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[Tripon]

“We’d never heard of National Doughnut Day when we were in business,” the 80-year-old Ziegler said of the annual event celebrated today. “It would have been good. Our customers were terrible at marketing.”

Ziegler would know. Decades before there were National Doughnut Day hashtags on social media, Ziegler’s Westco was introducing holiday-themed pastries, developing flavorings like the buttermilk bar and teaching bakers how to properly make an old fashioned (you turn it twice in the fryer).

Without Westco, and some of its competitors, L.A. may never have emerged as the unofficial doughnut capital of the world.

“They were huge,” said Stan Berman, 88, who has run the famed Stan’s Donuts in Westwood since 1965. “They were suppliers of everything.”

Westco, first known as the West Coast Supply Company before being shortened, was founded by Ziegler’s grandfather John Ziegler in the late-1920s — at least a decade before the Salvation Army established National Doughnut Day to commemorate female volunteers who served doughnuts to soldiers in the First World War.

(Ron Ziegler said pink boxes had been around for years, but mainly for cakes, pastries and cookies. They were supplied to Westco by a company that had equipment that could print pink ink on gray cardboard rather than the costlier white cardboard.)

In 1992, the Ziegler family sold Westco to CSM, a Dutch baking supply conglomerate. Westco was rebranded BakeMark, which continues to use Westco’s Pico Rivera address. Ron Ziegler’s son Tim Ziegler manages BakeMark’s customers on the central coast, imploring bakers to use the best ingredients like his father did years earlier.

“There’s no magic to a good doughnut other than good ingredients,” said Ron Ziegler, now retired with his wife Betty on a 200-acre ranch in Los Alamos, where the couple keep emus, alpacas and miniature donkeys. “You can’t make lead into gold.”

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-doughnuts-ziegler-20170601-story.html

 

[Ninja Scooter]

Was expecting Randy's.

 

[Deleted member 20415]

Whenever I am in LA, or on the west coast at all - I definitely have to get donuts.

People don't understand back east how good and different the donuts are.

East Coasts has bagels (New York only really) and West Coast has donuts.

 

[ratcliffja]

Was expecting Randy's.

I think that's why they didn't mention it in the title for the bait and switch. That donut is far too big to fit in someone's mouth anyway. I don't know who they're trying to fool.