Illustration by Lucie Rice
Dorothy Henke of Dot's Pretzels
In 2011 Dorothy Henke made her first ever batch of Dot’s Homestyle Pretzels, by hand, in her own home kitchen, with spices culled from a run to Sam’s Club. And that alone is weird to think about, because 2011 wasn’t that long ago. And by the time 2019 drew its curtains closed, these Dot’s pretzels had become sixth on the list of the country’s highest-selling pretzels, according to Nielsen market data. Which is to say Dot’s is now nipping at the heels of the Godzillas of the American pretzel scene, like Snyder’s and Rold Gold, in this $1.24 billion snack category.
Not bad for pretzels that only achieved national distribution within the last six months, and that mainly through hardware stores. Not bad for a regional pretzel of the #north—North Dakota, to be exact. Not bad for an operation that doesn’t bake pretzels at all.
Dot’s, if you’ve never tried them, sources the pretzels known in the industry as butter spinzels. These are straight-line twists about three inches long, pre-coated with a butter flavoring. And then Dot’s dots them with its own seasoning and re-bakes them, in a process familiar to anyone who has ever “made” Chex Mix out of cereal and nuts and a coating of spices. Dot’s own secret pretzel-seasoning process creates something salty and savory. It’s definitely “spiced” but not in any way spicy: You can tease out hints of onion powder, garlic powder, something tangy like buttermilk powder or vinegar powder. And is that dill and celery seed? There’s something a bit like Thanksgiving sage stuffing to them, if you could take stuffing and make it crisp and dry. As Doritos are to Doritos, Dot’s are to Dot’s—they don’t taste like anything except themselves.
What is it that makes you want to eat a third pretzel, and then a two hundredth? Ask away, but you will never know: The recipe is ultra top secret.
Dot’s Homestyle Pretzels are now joined by Dot’s first ever additional flavor, Southwest. Will there be a stampede to your local hardware store? Will Dot’s ascend even higher on the national pretzel charts? (I tasted them. Stand by!) Where did Dot’s really come from? Would-be Dot’s insiders, read on!
The first thing you need to know is that before the pretzels, no one ever, ever called Dorothy Henke “Dot.”
“I had a couple of friends call me ‘Dorth,’” Henke tells me on the phone one afternoon, from her home of more than 30 years on the family grain farm outside Minot.
“Dorth?” I ask.
“Dorth. I never liked Dottie. I was called Dottie at one of my jobs—hated it. They had another Dorothy. Everyone calls me Dorothy. My husband calls me Dorothy. He calls me toots, too!”
Dot simply looked better on the bag. Also, calling the pretzels “Dot’s” allows the real Dorothy Henke to hide behind the scenes.
“If I had to do this interview in front of people, I’d faint,” she says. “I do what I have to do, but a lot of the time I’m shaking the whole doggone time. I’d rather be in the back. The thing I’m good at is working.”
There it is. This one word, working, is the real key to understanding everything about Dot’s Pretzels. Dot’s has a very #northern story, and one that isn’t often written down: the sod-busting, brutal, rewarding life of the far-north farm. Settle in.
Henke was born Catholic in 1955, the youngest of six, on a 50-head dairy farm in Wahpeton. “My mom never called me an ‘oops,’ but I’m sure I was,” she says. “The next one to me is six years older.”
She grew up on a farm her grandfather bought during the Depression. She proudly describes him as stubborn bohunk German—that is, a German from the western side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before present-day Germany came to be. “Bohunk means you’re stubborn and independent, and that’s us.”
Stubborn and independent means no one ever stopped working. Here, Henke says, was her childhood life: “You got up in the morning and you had to milk the cows. Clean everything. You had to milk in the evening. Clean everything. That was a full-time job”
Then your other full-time jobs began. Feeding the cows, cleaning the chicken coops, the pig barns, the cow barns—all great fertilizer for the fields. Make sure the electric fence around the pigs is working, or they’ll dig out and cause havoc in the garden. If it’s Lent, you go fishing for dinner.
Raise the food for all your animals: “Grow your hay, swath it, rake it, bale it—we called them idiot bales,” remembers Henke. “They’re 30 or 40 pounds. Getting them on the trailer—that’s not easy when you’re a kid.
“Then there was my mother’s garden. I can’t imagine how many flipping strawberries I picked in my life. It sounds stupid, but people only wanted the big ones. The others we made into jam to sell. Oh yeah, we made jam. What didn’t we make! She had rhubarb, she had grapes, she had apple trees. She had enough to feed the county. And we did.”
There wasn’t much downtime. “I got to go Halloweening once in my life, and there were summers I never saw my friends because I was working,” she says. “I missed out on some parts of life.”
Henke remembers her mom rousing her on a hot night in summer: “‘I can’t sleep—let’s go slaughter 20 chickens before we go milking for the day.’ You think: You weren’t sleeping, but I was. But you couldn’t complain too much. There was nothing better than a freshly butchered chicken when you fried that up. You buy chicken in a store today, it’s not the same.”
Henke remembers her mom rousing her on a summer night: “‘I can’t sleep—let’s go slaughter 20 chickens before we go milking for the day.’”
Young Dorothy Henke’s playtime, as it were, involved standing side by side with her mother, improvising recipes as they put together dinner. “A little of this, a little of that. We weren’t big on recipes,” she says.
By the time Henke was a teenager, all her older siblings had fled the ceaseless work of the farm—for marriage, for the convent, for the army. And her dad developed cancer. Her parents sold the farm after Henke turned 18 and announced she didn’t want to become a dairy farmer. It was the biggest decision in the life of the family to date, and Henke still speaks of it gravely.
She considers it a blessing in hindsight: They got out before the 1980s farm crisis and before family dairy farms became an endangered species. Henke embarked on a career as a typist, which she considered luxuriously upholstered with downtime in the evenings. “You could read a book!” she says.
Eventually Henke married, divorced, and married again—this time to the grain farmer she remains married to today—and they raised three children. Her career morphed from general office to finance. She spent the final decade of her career working for an independent financial advisor and left the industry in 2012.
As Henke was starting to imagine her office-free downtime, she got a request for a snack assist from a cousin’s wife. Henke thought back: “I was at a wedding on a farm,” Henke says. “And they had that mix, with butter spinzels, and rye chips, Corn Chex, Rice Chex, nuts—you know the type. It had a sauce I didn’t care for, but it was intriguing. I got to playing around.”
She dipped into a snack experiment she’d conducted a few years earlier and passed along the results for distribution in little gifty bags. And when those were empty? “Well, the next thing I know, the phone was ringing off the hook from people who wanted more pretzels.”
Henke arranged to use the commercial kitchen at the grocery store in Velva, North Dakota, not far from Minot. And she began making her top-secret reseasoned Dot’s signature pretzels in 30-pound batches.
“Just like the idiot bales of hay when you were a kid,” I note.
“Exactly. Heavy,” Henke agrees.
She’d package them up and deliver them to gas stations and hardware stores. “I couldn’t go face to face: I’m too shy,” she says. “But I could send out sample boxes and call on the phone from home. I’d give them a gallon bag to sample, because you had to get it in people’s mouths. I’d call at least every six weeks. I’d say, ‘How much do you want me to call? Once a week? Every three weeks?’ I was religious about it: When they said they wanted to be called, I called."
Soon, Henke found herself working in this grocery store from one in the afternoon to 7 at night. “Some retirement!” says Henke.
The hardest part of her startup, she says now, was actually getting her hands on the pretzels. The baked-snack industry relies on different regional plants to fulfill individual orders for the brand names that appear on the outside of the bag. And the spectacular growth of Dot’s was not in their plans.
“It was hard to go against the big dogs alone,” Henke says. She took on investment partners and stepped aside as CEO. She remains, of course, the founder. Today Dot’s Homestyle Pretzels employs 70 people across the country, mainly in Velva, North Dakota, but also at the two plants in Kansas and Arizona.
As the founder, Dorothy Henke does things like invent this new Southwestern flavor, which of course is top secret. It tastes a whole lot like North Dakota taco bake, made crisp. Henke also talks to the press, as she did when we spoke, looking out her windows at the mums she transplanted from her mother’s long-ago garden.
Does she miss that kitchen garden—the one that fed the whole county in Wahpeton?
“Nope,” says Henke. “It’s easier going to the store. The one thing is, with my dad gone 32 years, and my mom died in ’07—they don’t have any idea what I did, which is kind of sad. When I reminisce on why I do what I do, it was because of my cooking with her. A little of this, a little of that. That’s how you cook on a farm.”
And there you have it, friends: The real secret of Dot’s Homestyle Pretzels is that they hearken to the fun you can steal in those scant minutes when you’re not performing chores on a northern farm. Premade pretzels, like you can pick up at Menards. Dry spices, like you get at the store. Add ingenuity, hard work, more hard work, a palate finely tuned to northern tastes—stuffing, ranch dressing, dill, taco dip.
It seems that this particular northern essence has never been bagged and distributed before, and a whole lot of us were just about starving for it.
