In a low-slung brick building in an industrial park in Bedford Park, under a flight path of nearby Midway International Airport and across the street from an International Paper Co. plant, Karim Khowaja is preparing your breakfast—and the breakfast of a few hundred thousand people from as far away as Kenosha, Wis., and Valparaiso, Ind.
Mr. Khowaja is one of 39 Dunkin' Donuts franchisees who pooled their financial resources a few years ago to create Unified CML LLC, the largest doughnut factory in the country for Dunkin' Brands Inc., the country's largest doughnut retailer. Over the course of a year, the crew produces 90 million glazed, powdered and jelly-filled pastries. That's enough to feed everyone in Soldier Field a dozen doughnuts a day every day for four months.
Except for a faint smell of sugar and yeast, the bakery is unremarkable from the outside. Step inside the 100,000-square-foot building, and it looks like a suburban supermarket that sells nothing but baked goods. “Doughnuts as far as the eye can see,” says Amish Patel, Unified CML's co-chairman and managing director at SevaBrands LLC in Chicago, which owns eight Dunkin' locations.
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