NEW YORK (AP) — Krispy Kreme and McDonald’s are getting together over breakfast.

The doughnut chain and the fast food giant unveiled plans Tuesday to offer Krispy Kreme products at McDonald’s locations across the United States. A phased rollout is expected to start later this year, the companies said, with availability at participating restaurants nationwide expected by the end of 2026.

McDonald’s didn’t specify how many of its 13,500 U.S. locations — 95% of which are franchised — would be participating in the deal. But in a prepared statement, Krispy Kreme President and CEO Josh Charlesworth said the partnership would give customers “unprecedented daily access” to the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company’s glazed, filled and frosted treats.

“By making Kreme Krispy accessible to fans nationwide through this partnership, we expect to more than double our points of access by the end of 2026,” Charlesworth said.

Tariq Hassan, chief marketing and customer experience officer for McDonald’s USA, said the deal marked a chance to “unlock new business opportunities” in the Chicago-based chain’s breakfast category and the sweet items it sells throughout the day.

McDonald’s plans to make three Krispy Kreme doughnut varieties — original glazed, chocolate iced with sprinkles and a filled chocolate iced — available individually and in boxes of six until daily supplies last.

The partnership is hardly the first bringing major restaurant chains and popular food brands together. Taco Bell, for example, has long boasted Doritos-flavored tacos while Wendy’s brought a Cinnabon “pull-apart” treat to its menu last month.

Krispy Kreme has teamed up with other businesses before. Krispy Kreme doughnuts are sold at Walmart, Kroger and other grocery chains along with the chain’s own stores. In total, the company says it operates in 35 countries with more than 14,000 “fresh points of access” through its own shops, retail partnerships and e-commerce business.

Following the announcement of the McDonald’s deal, shares of Krispy Kreme soared nearly 30% by late morning Tuesday. McDonald’s stock was up about 0.08%.

In an email to The Associated Press, a Krispy Kreme spokesperson said the company would not be disclosing any financial details about the deal, which is exclusive to the U.S. through 2026. McDonald’s did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

Related Articles

St. Paul Saints’ new menu items for 2024 include gigantic hot dog, sundae

Hmong-French bistro from notable pastry chef Diane Moua to open early April

New food hall Ate Ate Ate is coming to Burnsville Center

Wendy’s isn’t the first: Dynamic pricing is everywhere

Latin bistro Jackey’s Peg Leg opens in former Hunan Garden space in downtown St. Paul

NEW YORK (AP) — Shares of Donald Trump’s social media company jumped nearly 50% in the first day of trading on the Nasdaq, boosting the value of Trump’s large holdings in the company as well as the smaller stakes of fans who purchased shares as a show of support for the former president.

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. was acquired Monday by a blank-check company called Digital World Acquisition Corp. Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, has now taken Digital World’s place on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Before trading began, Trump Media had a market value of about $6.8 billion, a figure that will rise significantly if the early gains in the shares hold. The shares are trading under the ticker symbol “DJT.” Trump holds a nearly 60% ownership stake in the company. As of 9:55 a.m. ET, the shares were up 47% to $73.50.

Many of Trump Media’s investors are small-timers either trying to support Trump or aiming to cash in on the mania, instead of big institutional and professional investors. Those shareholders helped the stock of Digital World more than double this year in anticipation of the merger going through.

These investors could experience a bumpy ride. For one, they’re betting on a company with vague prospects of turning a profit. Trump Media lost $49 million in the first nine months of last year, when it brought in just $3.4 million in revenue and had to pay $37.7 million in interest expenses. In a recent regulatory filing, the company cited the high rate of failure for new social media platforms, as well as the company’s expectation that it will lose money on its operations “for the foreseeable future” as risks for investors.

Truth Social launched in February 2022, one year after Trump was banned from major social platforms including Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He’s since been reinstated to both but has stuck with Truth Social.

On Monday, Trump appeared in court in New York at hearing for a criminal case involving hush money payments made to cover up claims of marital infidelity. Afterwards, Trump told reporters that “Truth Social is doing very well. It’s hot as a pistol and doing great.”

However, Trump Media has yet to disclose Truth Social’s user numbers — although that should change now that the company is public. Research firm Similarweb estimates that Truth Social had roughly 5 million active mobile and web users in February. That’s far below TikTok’s more than 2 billion and Facebook’s 3 billion — but still higher than other “alt-tech” rivals like Parler, which has been offline for nearly a year but is planning a comeback, or Gettr, which had less than 2 million visitors in February.

Besides competition in the social media field, Trump Media faces other risks — including to some degree Trump.

Related Articles

Supreme Court’s anti-abortion conservatives could restrict abortion pills sent by mail, even in blue states

270,000 overdose deaths thrust fentanyl into heart of US presidential race

Trump’s New York hush money case is set for trial April 15

Court agrees to pause collection of Trump’s massive civil fraud judgment if he puts up $175M

Biden and Trump win Louisiana’s presidential primary having already clinched nominations

Trump Media, which is based in Palm Beach, Florida, said in a regulatory filing that it “is highly dependent on the popularity and presence of President Trump.” If the former president were to limit or discontinue his relationship with the company for any reason, including due to his campaign to regain the presidency, the company “would be significantly disadvantaged.”

Acknowledging Trump’s involvement in numerous legal proceedings, the company noted that “an adverse outcome in one or more” of the cases could negatively affect Trump Media and Truth Social.

Another risk, the company said, was that as a controlling stockholder, Trump would be entitled to vote his shares in his own interest, which may not always be in the interests of all the shareholders generally.

If recent trading activity is any indication, investors should expect the shares to be volatile. Digital World shares more than doubled this year ahead of a shareholder vote on the merger with Trump Media. After the vote Friday, shares dropped almost 14%, but Monday they rebounded strongly with a gain of 35%.

“Congestion pricing is just one of many tools that will help tame some of the city street chaos a generation of car-centric planning left us with. And one of the primary benefactors of congestion pricing will be automobile drivers themselves.”

CityViews are readers’ opinions, not those of City Limits. Add your voice today!

Hundreds of supporters and critics of the city’s proposed congestion pricing tolling plan sounded off at a final public hearing with MTA officials on March 4 in lower Manhattan.

Among the critics was New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who phoned in a claim that congestion pricing was not about congestion or the environment, but instead a means to solve the MTA’s deficit. The toll would be “backbreaking” for New Jersey commuters and would displace pollution from Manhattan to parts of New Jersey, the governor said.

Displace pollution from Manhattan to New Jersey? Cry me a carbon-free river.

Three to four days each week, I commute from Brooklyn to my job in lower Manhattan by bicycle. The route to the Brooklyn bridge takes me north from where I live in Carroll Gardens along a narrow, unprotected bike lane on Clinton Street to downtown Brooklyn and the entrance onto the bridge’s two-way bike path, which by the way, is right next to the car lanes headed into Manhattan. Along the way, I pass what seems like hundreds of cars, most of them oversized SUVs, inching slowly along like a crowded herd of angry hippos.

More than 90 percent of the time, the number of individuals inside those cars, both big and small, is just one.  I’d wager the same is true for the scores of private cars heading in from New Jersey and beyond.

This being New York City, the demand for real estate will always outweigh supply—and that includes space on our city streets, which in Manhattan’s case, are filled to capacity with big, loud, carbon-belching automobiles. Considering the toll they take on the rest of us, automobile drivers have been getting an absurdly generous deal for that valuable space.

Streets are our largest public spaces. Yet, with 19,000 lane miles and three million street parking spots, New York City surrenders an astonishing amount of these precious public assets to automobiles, free of charge. Our streets should be valued by imposing monetary costs on the automobile drivers who crowd onto them each day.

Like the majority of city residents, I don’t have a car. I’ve not owned a car since I moved to New York City from the car-loving deep south more than three decades ago. I never really wanted the burden of owning, driving and storing a car. Besides that, I’ve always been a bicycling or public transit commuter.

New Yorkers own fewer than a third as many cars per capita as the average U.S. urban resident (about 23 per 100 residents compared to about 77 per 100 in most urban areas). Across the five boroughs, around 45 percent of residents own a car but only a fraction of those individuals commute by car to work in Manhattan each day.  The Traffic Mobility Review Board has said 150,000 people travel by car into Manhattan for work, while nearly 1 million take public transit.

And that makes Gov. Murphy’s whining about the burdens a tolling system will place on a tiny yet very vocal group of New Jersey drivers all the more grating.

In addition to our city tax dollars paying for the constant repairs to damage done to our infrastructure caused by congestion, we should also call out the mental and physical health toll automobiles wreak on pedestrians, cyclists and city residents.

Cars rattle our nerves and they inflict bone crushing, life changing and crippling injuries upon thousands of New Yorkers each year. Cars kill cats, birds and dogs. More heartbreaking, we lost nearly 100 pedestrians to auto violence in 2023 and a record number of cyclists were killed by drivers as well. Vision Zero is still just a vision today because of irresponsible and often entitled automobile drivers.

That sense of entitlement has its roots in the decades of destructive, car-centric urban planning from the likes of highway-happy power broker Robert Moses, who for all his accomplishments was inexcusably hostile to public transportation. It’s through no fault of our own, that no matter what part of the United States we come from, we’re conditioned early on to believe streets and roads were created solely for the automobile’s use.

Congestion pricing is just one of many tools that will help tame some of the city street chaos a generation of car-centric planning left us with. And, one of the primary benefactors of congestion pricing will be automobile drivers themselves.  

In 10 years, New Yorkers will probably look back on the days of toll-free driving in Manhattan’s central business district—and, hopefully someday too, at the absurdity of free on street parking—with bemusement.

Congestion pricing is a step forward into the sort of city I want to live in; a city with an even more extensive, fast moving and reliable transit system, a city where riding a bicycle or other micro-mobility device is not only safe, but seen as the norm.

I also want to live in a city where pedestrians don’t have to spend so much time worrying about dodging aggressive drivers, who are understandably angry after being stuck in Manhattan congestion for hours at a time. 

Cody Lyon is a former journalist and a Manhattan Community Board 1 member.