Donut Robot: From Hand-Cut Rings to ABB Cobots

A donut robot can mean two very different things. One is a fryer that cuts, cooks and flips rings on its own. The other is a robot arm that frosts, sorts and boxes them. Both ideas are older than most people think, and both are moving into bigger bakeries now. This post follows the donut from a pan of hot fat on a stove to the automated factory lines being built today. Along the way it looks at which ABB robots suit the work, and where the real limits still are for shops and homes.

Doughnuts fry in a pan over a coal pot, the way the job was done before machines. Photo: Creative Gurus / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How the donut hole met the conveyor belt

For a long time, frying donuts meant a cook, a pot of fat and patience. The dough was rolled, cut and dropped in by hand, then turned and lifted out one ring at a time. Home cooks used cutters like the one in an 1904 U.S. patent for a cake or doughnut cutter. The hole has a famous origin story: Hanson Gregory, a Maine sailor, said in a 1916 newspaper interview that he invented it in 1847, at about sixteen years old. Historians doubt the tale, but it stuck.

A 1904 U.S. patent drawing for a cake or doughnut cutter. Photo: U.S. National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Frying by hand sets a hard ceiling on output. One person watching one pan can only turn so many rings in an hour, and every donut has to be tended at the moment it is ready. Bakers who wanted to sell donuts by the hundred needed more cooks, more pans and more floor space. The work stayed hot, greasy and repetitive, which is the kind of job that attracts a machine sooner or later. Anyone who has fried a batch for a crowd knows how quickly the last rings in the pan go dark while you plate the first.

Doughnuts frying in a pan of hot oil, still a one-pan-at-a-time job. Photo: Waldo Jaquith / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In 1920 Adolph Levitt, a Russian immigrant baker in New York, built an automatic doughnut machine. It formed the rings, fried them and carried them along a conveyor. Levitt later founded the Doughnut Corporation of America, which sold machines and ready-made mixes to bakeries across the country. Krispy Kreme's first shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, kept its production line in view, with rings riding a conveyor behind glass. Nobody called these machines robots yet, but the idea was already in place.

An employee watches the production line at the first Krispy Kreme shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Donut lines, cobots and the Sheffield factory

The word has since stuck to the fryers themselves. Belshaw, a maker of donut equipment, sells a fryer line named the Donut Robot, and dealers list large models that fry well over a thousand donuts an hour. Those figures are the sellers' own claims, so treat them as such. The rest of the shop remains manual in many places: someone still glazes, fills, decorates and packs, often at the same bench, hour after hour. That is where the newer robots come in.

A conveyor fryer carries rows of doughnuts through hot oil in a Krispy Kreme shop. Photo: Neil T / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Recent news points the same direction. Mr Whippy opened a test launch at its new £15 million doughnut factory in Sheffield in early October 2026. Reports describe an end-to-end automated plant with manufacturing, packing and dispatch under one roof, with equipment from WP Kemper, Rondo, Proseal and Starfrost, and a target above 104 million doughnuts a year. Those reports do not say whether robot arms are used. Krispy Kreme said in 2023 that it would spend $6 million on automation for frosting, filling, sprinkles and packaging. At Anuga FoodTec in 2022, ASA Automation showed a donut line with Fanuc cobots inspecting, handling and packing.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots picking chocolate balls at Delicato. Photo: ABB

ABB has not announced a donut project that I could find, so what follows is a possibility, not a customer story. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a delta robot built for fast picking and packing of light products, which fits sorting finished donuts into trays and boxes at line speed. The IRB 1200 Hygienic is designed for food areas that get washed down, which suits a spot at the end of a fryer. Programs for cells like these are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio, before anything is installed.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas, a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

What comes next for the donut robot

For the corner shop, the problem is money and space more than skill. A small bakery with a few staff will not buy an industrial cell for glazing. Smaller steps seem more realistic: a cobot at the end of a fryer to load trays, or a machine that tops each ring from a hopper. The ABB GoFa CRB 15000 is a cobot with a 5 kg payload, made to work beside people without a safety fence. A cell like that could take over the dullest hour of the morning, though no ABB donut shop exists today.

A Krispy Kreme shop in the Winston-Salem area, where the frying is automated and the finishing is mostly manual. Photo: Harrison Keely / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Factories face a different set of problems. Donuts are soft, sticky and oily, so a gripper has to hold them without leaving marks or picking up glaze. Hygiene rules require washdown designs. Vision systems have to judge color, shape and decoration across thousands of pieces. Krispy Kreme's 2023 plan named frosting, filling, sprinkles and packaging as the first jobs to automate, which are the steps with the most repetition. See other ABB robot use cases for how similar sticky, delicate products are handled elsewhere.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

At home, nobody is likely to own a fryer with a robot arm soon. Hot oil near a moving arm raises a real safety question, and a household has little use for several dozen donuts an hour. A home donut robot, if one appears, will probably be a countertop machine with a hopper and a fryer, not an arm. The frying job has been moved from the cook to the machine step by step since 1920, and the remaining manual steps in the factory are the ones robots are now taking.

A worker at a Krispy Kreme window in front of the Hot Now neon sign. Photo: Public Information Office / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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