Inside Carolina Foods, the commercial bakery that makes South End smell like doughnuts

The wholesale sweet goods bakery was founded in 1934 by Vernon Scarborough and remains in the family today. It started as a sandwich operation servicing local mill and textile workers, eventually adding doughnuts and pies to the product lineup after World War II.

In 1992, the Scarboroughs decided to shut down their sandwich operation to focus exclusively on sweets and that, my friends, is why South End smells delicious.

In honor of National Doughnut Day the notoriously private bakery let me in for a tour of the facility.

Vernon’s granddaughter Katie Scarborough Caldwell, who grew up in the business and works today as its CFO, showed me around the massive 120,000-square-foot production facility on S. Tryon Street.

And we aren’t the only ones who wanted a peek. Food Network was just there filming another episode of Unwrapped last week.

Carolina Foods is home to Duchess brand honey buns, gem doughnuts, pies, apple fritters, cinnamon rolls and dunking sticks.

They also offer private label manufacturing and co-packing for major snack brands that you definitely know but that definitely prefer not to be mentioned.

The production facility is a mind-boggling maze of conveyor belts, cooling racks, fryers and sugary showers of chocolate and glaze.

It’s a veritable Wonka factory in there.

Carolina Foods operates 8 high-speed state-of-the-art production lines.

I couldn’t even keep up with what went where but Katie pointed out how belts ran up around the perimeter of the room and then on to the next phase of production.

The pecan pie line was one of my favorites.

In 24 hours, Carolina Foods uses more than 10,000 pounds of corn syrup, 12,000 pounds of sugar, 13,000 pounds of flour and 9,000 pounds of liquid egg whites just to make its mini 3-inch pecan pies.

Watching them all lined up marching along like little pie soldiers was seriously mesmerizing.

Although exactly how many doughnuts they produce per minute is a protected trade secret, the short answer is that it’s a whole lot.

In a year, Carolina Foods makes enough doughnuts here in Charlotte to circle the Earth 2 times. To make that many doughnuts annually, they need 423 truckloads of flour, 238 truckloads of sugar and 71 million eggs.

Once everything is baked, dressed and cooled, it gets packed up and shipped off to convenience stores, grocery stores and other locations for sale.

So the next time you spot Duchess brand baked goods on the shelf, you’ll know they were made right here in Charlotte.

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