Since July 1937, Krispy Kreme has tempted the public with tasty, fresh doughnuts, but it will be even sweeter when the company opens in Salisbury in the spring.

“The most exciting part is, when you drive down the road and see a Krispy Kreme location like this, they have a red neon sign in the window. If that red sign is on, it’s saying hot doughnuts are ready. It means they are baking right now and those doughnuts melt in your mouth,” a smiling Wesley Cox of SVN-Miller Commercial Real Estate, who handled the account, said.

Known as the hot light, it has been drawing customers since 1992.

The new shop, on North Salisbury Boulevard, will be where Bay Country Meals used to be. The building and a one-acre lot were purchased from the Hall family that owned English’s restaurants for $1.07 million, Cox said.

“Krispy Kreme liked it because it was a free-standing building and it had a drive through already in place,” said Cox, who called on company representatives and urged them to open in Salisbury.

“Two years ago this coming February, I met with them and I said, ‘You guys need to pay attention to Salisbury. You need to focus on Salisbury,’” Cox said.

The following year, there was another meeting in Washington, D.C.

“I said, ‘Guys, you need to be in Salisbury. Picking up from our last meeting last year, I now have a site that is off the market. Nobody knows about it. It’s just for you guys,’” he said.

Two months later, there was an agreement, said Cox, who was pleasantly surprised when company officials arrived in town with a couple boxes of signature doughnuts.

Cox said the company recently received a building permit for the 4,000-square-foot commercial bakery.

“They have a machine that can make dozens of doughnuts every minute. It’s a commercial baking machine customized for them for their baking process,” Cox said.

“There is a franchisee in place who will operate the location and they have a developer in place from North Carolina that will do all the construction and get them set up,” Cox said. Monument Restaurants, based in Richmond, will develop the bakery.

Founded by Vernon Rudolph, who bought a secret yeast-raised doughnut recipe from a New Orleans French chef, Krispy Kreme started as a Winston-Salem, N.C., business that sold the pastries to grocery stores.

But, the company Web site explains, “the delicious scent of cooking doughnuts drifted into the streets, and passersby stopped to ask if they could buy hot doughnuts.”

“So, he (Rudolph) cut a hole in an outside wall and started selling hot original glazed doughnuts directly to customers on the sidewalk.”

There are now more than 1,000 stores.

Krispy Kreme opening in Salisbury “shows the strength of the market here,” Cox said.

“If Krispy Kreme is making this type of investment in the Salisbury market-- because it’s not inexpensive – they feel it’s going to be a very strong market for them,” he said.