The truth behind the glaze...
Amid the quest to create a low-fat, tasty doughnut, attempts to trick consumers with false labeling are exposed
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By Shirley Leung
The Wall Street Journal
January 27, 2004
NEW YORK -- Robert Ligon, a 68-year-old health-food executive, began serving 15 months in a federal prison earlier this month.
His crime: willfully mislabeling doughnuts as low-fat.
Exhibit A: The label on his company's "carob-coated" doughnut said it had 3 grams of fat and 135 calories. But an analysis by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration showed that the doughnut, glazed with chocolate, contained a sinfully indulgent 18 grams of fat and 530 calories.
Ligon's three-year-long nationwide doughnut caper -- which involved selling mislabeled doughnuts, cinnamon rolls and cookies to diet centers -- began to crumble when customers complained to the FDA about how tasty his products were.
"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," said Jim Dahl, assistant director of the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigation. The skinny on low-fat doughnuts: "Science can do a lot of things, but we're not quite there yet."
Flavor from fat
The low-fat doughnut is the Holy Grail of the food industry. Food companies have been able to take most of the fat out of everything from cheese to Twinkies. But no one has succeeded in designing a marketable doughnut that dips below the federal low-fat threshold of three grams per serving.
Doughnuts typically range from 8 grams of fat for a glazed French cruller to more than double that for a cake-like doughnut.
Perhaps no other bakery good is so dependent on fat. After the batter is shaped into rings and dropped into hot oil, the deep-frying process preserves the shape, gives the doughnut a crust and pushes out moisture, allowing for the absorption of fat. The fat itself is responsible for most of its flavor.
A doughnut contains as much as 25 percent fat; the bulk of that is the oil absorbed during frying, according to the American Institute of Baking, a research and teaching outfit based in Manhattan, Kan., that is financed by the baking industry.
The low-fat doughnut, declared Len Heflich, an industry executive at the American Bakers Association, is "not possible."
Science steps in
That hasn't stopped almost everyone in the approximately $3 billion doughnut industry from trying.
In the late 1980s, Dunkin' Donuts briefly offered a cholesterol-free doughnut that contained no eggs and no milk. It went nowhere. During the 1990s, Entenmann's Bakery offered a doughnut with 25 percent less fat, but poor sales forced the company to shelve it. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Inc. has explored low-fat or low-calorie options but has yet to roll one out.
Some bakeries sell "baked doughnuts" that are low in fat, but doughnut-makers say that's cheating: If it's baked, it's a cake.
Scientists also are trying to put the doughnut on a diet. U.S. Patent No. 6,001,399 claims that replacing sugar with polydextrose, a low-calorie synthetic sweetener commonly found in ice cream and frozen foods, can reduce the doughnut's absorption of frying fats by 25 percent to 30 percent.
In addition, U.S. Patent No. 4,937,086 says that injecting polyvinylpyrrolidone, which normally keeps pills in packed form, into the doughnut batter reduces fat by 30 percent without a "pasty or greasy taste."
In an article entitled "Development of Low Oil-Uptake Donuts" published in 2001 in the Journal of Food Science, scientists at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service wrote that adding rice flour to the traditional wheat-flour-base doughnut mix lowered fat by 64 percent.
Fred Shih, a chemist who helped author the study, said the doughnut that resulted was tasty, but he doesn't expect to see it on grocer shelves anytime soon.
"It worked in a lab," he said, but "it may not be so easily converted into commercial operation." (One kink: short shelf life.)
Failing the taste test
Despite its no-cholesterol-doughnut flop, Dunkin' Donuts, the nation's largest doughnut chain, continues to push ahead in the quest for a low-fat doughnut. The company's doughnut technologists have all but ruled out tinkering with its closely held, 26-ingredient batter, which contains little fat.
The chain, a unit of London-based Allied Domecq PLC with outlets throughout the Baltimore region, has tried frying dough in a fat substitute but feared its digestive side effects would leave a bad taste.
At its product laboratory in Braintree, Mass., one recent morning, researchers in white lab coats tasted and prodded their latest prototype: a chewier-than-average doughnut that is not fried, but made on a machine that resembles a waffle maker.
The result weighs in at 150 calories, half the amount of its full-fat cousin, and fewer than 3 grams of fat. Still, this doughnut fails to meet Dunkin's standards of texture, taste and something called "mouth feel."
"We would love to be able to offer a great-tasting doughnut that is low-fat," said Joe Scafido, chief menu and concept officer for Allied Domecq's quick-service restaurants, "but I'm not sure we're going to get there."
Low-fat fraud grows
The criminal files on doughnut-related fraud thickened in the 1990s after new federal laws required more-detailed labeling of food. The FDA's Office of Criminal Investigation said that about a quarter of its cases involved food, most related to tampering.
About 20 percent of those food cases are related to the "misbranding" of food, such as false labels or misstated country of origin.
Ligon, who began his sentence Jan. 6, was not the first doughnut derelict. In 2000, Vernon Patterson, president of Genesis II Foods Inc., an Illinois bakery, pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud for passing off three varieties of doughnuts as low-fat.
According to federal court records, customers helped build the case against Patterson by raising questions about his suspiciously tasty low-fat treats. Patterson served one year and a day in a federal prison.
The doughnut ring of Ligon, a former weight-loss-center franchisee, began in 1995, according to the FDA. That's when he started a weight-loss product company, Nutrisource Inc., to sell protein shakes, nutritional bars and baked goods to diet centers.
According to Rudy Hejny, the FDA agent in charge of the investigation, Ligon bought full-fat doughnuts from Cloverhill Bakery, a Chicago company, and repackaged them as diet doughnuts. It was a lucrative operation: Ligon would buy doughnuts for 25 cents to 33 cents each and then resell the mislabeled versions for a dollar each.
Customer complaints to the FDA started rolling in, questioning whether these were in fact low-fat doughnuts. So did one from a packaging company Ligon hired to label and distribute the doughnuts. Key evidence: One of its employees gained weight after eating Ligon's doughnuts.
Doughnuts seized
The FDA began an investigation in 1997, tracking down Ligon's customers and former business partners in a previous weight-loss-product company.
Investigators learned that this wasn't Ligon's first brush with improperly labeled doughnuts. One of his former customers, the owner of a weight-loss center, had grown suspicious after briefly placing one of his doughnuts on a napkin to answer the phone.
"She saw a grease ring," Hejny said. The customer had the doughnut independently tested and discovered it was not low-fat. No legal action was taken.
In the summer of 1997, the FDA, armed with search warrants, raided Ligon's office and packaging facilities in Kentucky and Illinois, seizing 18,720 doughnuts, along with cinnamon rolls and labels. Ligon shut down the business, but the FDA pursued a criminal case.
Abuse of trust
In 2001, a U.S. District Court grand jury in Chicago indicted Ligon on mail fraud for his role in carrying out a scheme that involved shipping falsely labeled goods. In September, he pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud.
At the time of sentencing, the government calculated he tried to sell several hundred thousand dollars' worth of mislabeled doughnuts and cinnamon rolls.
"Mr. Ligon abused the trust people put on these labels," said Stuart Fullerton, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case. "It's kind of cruel on his part to do this."
Reached on his mobile telephone before beginning his sentence, Ligon said he did not intentionally break the law and never heard a single complaint about his doughnuts.
"Everybody wanted the product and were very upset they couldn't get the product," he said. Asked if he felt the punishment fit the crime, he said: "I feel like I've been singled out."
For all his troubles, Ligon said he doesn't even eat doughnuts. That works out fine. Most federal prisons, a spokeswoman said, don't serve doughnuts.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
