Executive Chat - Betsy Hamm - Duck Donuts CEO

Executive Chat featuring Betsy Hamm, CEO of Duck Donuts

Betsy Hamm, CEO of Duck Donuts, shares her insights on the brand’s rapid growth, the exciting digital initiatives transforming the customer experience, and the innovative products that keep fans coming back for more.

What new initiatives and projects are you most excited about at Duck Donuts?

The biggest initiative I'm excited about is enhancing our digital customer journey. We're working on several projects to improve the digital experience for our customers, making it easier and more convenient to order donuts. We're about to launch a new website and online ordering platform. We also recently signed on to use a Customer Data Platform (CDP), which will allow us to be more targeted with our messaging and understand customer behaviors better. I believe these digital initiatives will have the greatest impact on our sales moving forward.

Duck Donuts has grown significantly since you joined and became CEO. What strategic decisions do you think have been the most impactful?

There have been so many! This week marks my eighth anniversary with Duck Donuts, and I’ve been in the CEO role for three years. When I first joined, we had 20 shops and a handful of franchisees, and I was the first hire outside of the founders’ friends and family.

Looking back, we made crucial decisions in strategy, structure, people, and processes. We had to redefine the brand, which started in the vacation town of the Outer Banks. Our goal was to evolve while staying true to our roots—made-to-order, customizable donuts. We've focused on simplifying processes, improving speed of service, and expanding the product line. Every time we scale, we face new challenges, but all the decisions along the way helped shape who we are today.

How do you see the brand continuing to develop in the coming years?

We’ve learned that while we started as a donut and breakfast concept, we need to go beyond breakfast. We've focused on the treat category. Donuts are our core, but we’ve launched innovations like the Donut Ice Cream Sandwich and the Donut Breakfast Sandwich. We're also expanding into beverages, like the refreshers we’re launching next week, and focusing on cold beverages and ice cream. Our goal is to increase customer frequency by giving people more reasons to visit. Since people don’t typically eat donuts every week, we need to offer more variety.

You have some tempting flavors like the Apple Cobbler Donut. Can you walk us through your process for new product innovation?

We have an R&D team that looks at data from partners and vendors to identify trends. But we also do a lot of customer research. While we all have our opinions—myself and the franchisees—hearing from customers is most important. Once we identify a concept, the R&D team develops recipes, ensuring they’re easy to execute and have a good shelf life. We test products in five to ten shops to gather feedback before rolling them out nationally. Some products, like the Apple Cobbler Donut, come back year after year, while others, like our Girl Scout Cookie partnership, are new and exciting collaborations.

You spent 14 years at Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, rising through various marketing roles. How did that experience shape your leadership at Duck Donuts?

Hershey was an amazing experience. It's a nostalgic brand with a long history, and people have such a deep connection to it. But being part of a large company, I sometimes felt like I couldn’t make a direct impact. At Duck Donuts, it's been the opposite. We’re a young brand, and there’s so much opportunity to make a meaningful impact every day. Everyone on our team, not just me, has the ability to come up with great ideas and influence our direction. It's exciting to be part of a brand that's growing and evolving, knowing that what we do today will shape the future.

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