J.Co Donuts

After writing about Indonesia's local burger, this time I want to introduce Indonesia's local donut : J.Co.

J.Co Donuts & Coffee is owned by Johnny Andrean.
Johnny Andrean is an Indonesian hairstylist, renowned for his beauty salon chain (named after himself) : "Johnny Andrean".

He first went into the food industry in 2003 by opening BreadTalk, a Singaporean bakery franchise, in Jakarta. The franchise proved to be a success with long lines of people wanting to buy the bread. This became a talked about phenomenon.

After the success of BreadTalk, Johnny Andrean eventually opened the first J.Co outlet in June 2005. This was not just something he did in the spur of BreadTalk's success (although I do think that naturally he was a bit influenced, you can see by the open kitchen concept J.Co adopts, similar to BreadTalk's). Before launching the donuts, he did extensive research to get the delicious J.Co taste and decide on the flavors. And the results paid off.

J.Co Donuts now has outlets not only in Indonesia, but also in Malaysia & Singapore.

Personal Note :

I think J.Co tastes better than Dunkin Donuts. It is more light & the dough is more soft. Dunkin has a more thick taste to it. Another advantage of J.Co to Dunkin is that J.Co has more variety. Dunkin, being the only donut company at the time, may have gotten lazy thus when J.Co came with many flavors that suited the Indonesian tongue, it became a breath of fresh-air.

Nowadays, J.Co seems to have topped Dunkin as the number one donut company in Indonesia. I was anxious to see how J.Co would do after Krispy Kreme eventually entered the Indonesian market in 2006. But it turns out that J.Co Donuts are still popular. I have tried Krispy Kreme and I think it tastes too sweet. I guess I wasn't the only one thinking this, because eventually Krispy Kreme came out with new flavors that were promoted as "less sweet".

For more info on J.Co donuts, please go to their website : http://www.jcodonuts.com/