Iowa's First Donut Machine: Iowa Time Machine February 6, 1929

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On February 6, 1929, the Trausch Baking Company unveiled Iowa's first donut-making machine, bringing industrial-scale sweetness to the Mississippi River city.

Donuts gained widespread popularity after World War I, when millions of American soldiers in the trenches of France were served donuts by women volunteers who brought them to the front lines to give soldiers a tasty touch of home. When these doughboys returned stateside, they carried a mighty craving for the fried treats that had sustained them overseas. In 1920, Adolph Levitt, a Jewish refugee fleeing czarist Russia, invented the first automated donut machine in New York City, capitalizing on this unprecedented demand. He called his invention the Wonderful Almost Human Automatic Doughnut Machine, which would form and plop perfectly shaped dough rings into a vat of oil, turn them at a timed interval, then push them out when done.

The Trausch Baking Company, established in 1907 as the John P. Trausch Baking Company, remained family-owned until 1976 and became one of Dubuque's first bakeries to make a complete line of baked goods. When the company introduced Iowa's first donut machine that February morning in 1929, the timing proved fortuitous. The bakery was among the first in the nation to adopt new technologies, including the first purchase of a donut machine in Iowa, and among the earliest bakeries to use a bread slicer invented by Otto Rohwedder in 1929.

The Trausch family understood that staying competitive meant embracing innovation, even if that innovation involved mechanical arms flipping rings of dough in hot oil. Customers who had previously waited for hand-fried donuts could now watch through bakery windows as dozens emerged each hour, glazed and still warm. The Trausch plant in Dubuque, first built in 1931 and restored after devastating flooding in 1965, has had six different owners and is still operating today as a vital facility of Bimbo Bakeries USA. #Iowa #OTD #History #Donut #Food