The doughnut wars have come to the UK. American fried dough giants Dunkin' Donuts is to go head-to-head with Krispy Kreme in the battle for Britain's bulging waistlines. The company has just announced plans to open 150 restaurants in the UK over the next five years. Sooner or later, every doughnut lover is going to have to pick a side.
Here are six facts about Dunkin' Donuts to help you make up your mind:
1. There are 49g of sugar in a single one of its donuts. That's more than half the guideline daily amount. The first casualty of the doughnut war is health.
2. The company doesn't just sell sugary circles of fried dough. Dunkin' Donuts is a major player in the coffee market, with worldwide sales of more than 1.7bn cups of coffee a year.
3. As you might expect from those coffee sales, Dunkin' is also at war with Starbucks. Television ads for Dunkin' Donuts have been mocking the coffee chain's pretentious use of foreign sizes for years – and it announced plans in July to encroach on Starbucks' west coast turf by opening 200 new stores in California.
4. Dunkin' Donuts issued an apology last month after an ad for its "charcoal donut" in Thailand, featuring a woman in blackface makeup, was described as "bizarre and racist" by Human Rights Watch.
5. That's not the first time its advertising has pushed boundaries. This month, it became the first firm to use a Vine video as a TV advert. The video was a lot less offensive, to be fair: a five-second clip of a latte flipping a coin.
6. Dunkin Donuts lattes can't actually flip coins.
