It’s a weird situation where a company apologizes for one of its hit products. But that’s what happened this week when Mister Donut said it was sorry for the rampant “individuality” of its new Pokémon donuts.
Mister Donut is an American company currently owned by Inspire Brands. There’s only a single Mister Donut remaining in the states, down from 550 stores in the US and Canada at its peak. However, its Japan franchise – run by Duskin, a subsidiary of Mitsui – is Japan’s largest donut chain. It’s also Japanese consumer’s third favorite fast-food restaurant (McDonald’s and MOS Burger take first and second place).
Like most companies in Japan, it frequently releases limited-edition donuts to spark consumer interest. This November and December, the company relaunched its recurring Pokémon promotion with Nintendo that included Pikachu, Pokeball, and Diglett (Japanese: ディグダ; diguda) donuts. The company also released a “Diglett Trio” – a triply-conjoined donut of three Digletts.
It’s the Digletts that have taken Japanese social media by storm. Many Digletts – due to their hand-made creation by different employees, factors such as heat and jostling, and the simply awkward shape of the pill-shaped donut – end up having their own unique characteristics. That’d led X users to post pics of their own private Digletts, much to everyone’s amusement.
“Our Diglett’s got a mouth, a jutting jaw, and a crew cut, amazing,” wrote user @ayuzakana417.
“My friend’s Diglett made me laugh so hard I thought I was gonna hyperventilate, so I made it my phone wallpaper,” tweeted @arianico.
We ordered the Diglett donuts ourselves. Our guy wasn’t exceptional, although he did look like he was at the beginning stages of a bad LSD trip. (Our Pikachu, by contrast, was very textbook.)
No apologies necessary, say customers
Not everyone’s happy about the Variant Digletts, however. And by “not everyone,” I mean Mister Donut. In an interview with ITMedia Netlab, the company’s advertising department said they never intended to go viral like this.
“We’re considering what to do about the variations,” they said, saying that they weren’t “intentional” and reflect “a lack of instruction on the part of corporate.”
“We feel bad about it,” they lamented.
The apology is, perhaps, not unexpected. Chain restaurants succeed by providing a reliable, repeatable experience to their customers. That’s doubly true in Japan, where the American-style franchise model – individual store owners operating outlets with loose instructions from corporate – has never been popular. Most companies here manage their franchises down to the precise details.
However, in this case, customers don’t seem to mind. In fact, they enjoy the discrepancies.
“They’re not made by machines,” one user noted on Yahoo! News JP. “And it’s not the same people making all of them. You’re bound to have variations.”
“Pokémon has individual characteristics,” wrote another. “It’s natural, right?”
“The variations are fun,” another wrote in a reply to Yahoo! News JP on X that received 20,000 likes. “Ours has grown eyelashes.”
Mister Donut will continue selling the Pok̩mon donuts until the end of December Рhopefully, with all their uniqueness and individuality on full display.
