A restaurateur, a test kitchen and a baker from Edmonds.

Cinnabon was created in the Seattle area in 1985 by Rich Komen, whose company Restaurants Unlimited ran full-service restaurants and stadium concessions. Seattle Met, in a feature by Allecia Vermillion published in October 2017, traces the idea to the final days of 1984, when Komen flew to Kansas City to see T. J. Cinnamons, a cinnamon-roll counter in the Ward Parkway Shopping Center. He tried to secure franchise rights to that concept on the West Coast, and then to the rolls of Mrs. Powell’s in Idaho Falls, and neither deal worked out. By then he had already leased a space in SeaTac Mall, south of Seattle in what is now Federal Way, Washington, so, the magazine says, he decided to invent a concept of his own. Wikipedia names Ray Lindstrom, then Restaurants Unlimited’s chief executive, as Komen’s partner in developing it.

The recipe came from Jerilyn Brusseau, who ran Brusseau’s restaurant in Edmonds, just north of Seattle, and had grown up making cinnamon rolls with her grandmother in Montana. Seattle Met says she reported to the Restaurants Unlimited test kitchen on Northlake Way in late August 1985, working alongside Komen’s son, Greg Komen. Rich Komen had a sign made for the kitchen with a single word, “Irresistible”, and set practical rules, among them a cream cheese icing and a roll that had to bake in a convection oven within the time a customer would wait in line. A spice supplier steered the team to Korintje cinnamon from Sumatra, the magazine says, and Greg Komen made the final adjustment to the baking shortly before opening.

The bakery opened on 4 December 1985 in SeaTac Mall. A company press release from September 2015 describes Rich and Greg Komen as the father-and-son pair who opened it and calls Brusseau the master baker they recruited to help perfect the recipe. Seattle Met says the company later gave her an official nickname, “Cinnamom”, and still called on her for television appearances. Greg Komen managed the SeaTac store in its opening weeks before leaving to open the next one, in Las Vegas, and hired Debbie Rowley, a colleague from the company’s Cutters restaurant, to replace him.

A name from bonbon, then AFC, Focus Brands and GoTo Foods.

Seattle Met says the name was the work of Terry Heckler, the Seattle advertising man behind the walking Rainier Beer bottles of that brewery’s regional television spots, whom Komen hired to name the shop. Heckler did not want “bun” in it, since to him the word suggested savoury, bready things; he started instead from the bonbon, and pointed out to the magazine that bon is French for “good”. Many customers have still pronounced the name “Cinnabun”, the article adds.

Franchising followed quickly. Wikipedia dates the earliest franchise-operated store to August 1986, at the King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia. Seattle Met says that upmarket Seattle-area malls, Northgate and Bellevue Square among them, at first turned the single-product concept down and then came round once they saw the trading figures at SeaTac, and that from the early 1990s airports became a second natural home for the brand.

By 1998, Seattle Met says, Rich Komen was ready to sell, and the buyer was AFC Enterprises; Wikipedia says the headquarters moved to the Atlanta area in 1999. In 2004 AFC sold Cinnabon to Focus Brands, an affiliate of the Atlanta private-equity firm Roark Capital. Restaurant Business reported in 2024 that Roark had bought Cinnabon together with Seattle’s Best Coffee from AFC that year and combined them with the ice-cream brand Carvel, which it had acquired in 2001. Greg Komen kept a small group of bakeries when his father sold, including the one in Bellevue Square, the magazine reported in 2017.

In July 2010 Nation’s Restaurant News reported that Cinnabon, then a division of Focus Brands Restaurant Group, planned to test breakfast and lunch as part of a move toward a bakery-café format, and its president, Gary Bales, told the paper the chain had tested a redesign in 2009 “that featured a much cleaner look with more contemporary dark wood and less clutter.” Focus Brands went on to buy Auntie Anne’s later in 2010, and in February 2024 it renamed itself GoTo Foods, Restaurant Business reported. The Atlanta-based company has owned Cinnabon since 2004, under one name or the other. Wikipedia notes partnerships beyond the bakeries, among them Cinnabon Mini Rolls sold through Pizza Hut from October 2018 and a 2020 agreement with the British retailer EG Group to open Cinnabon outlets in the UK.

Design and documentation.

A mall treat shop has to be read from a distance and in a hurry. Many of its customers are walking past, often with somewhere else to be, so the name above the counter, the colour of the canopy and the shape of the sign do most of the work before anyone reaches the menu board. In a food court or on a concourse, a kiosk may stand only a few steps from a rival, which puts weight on a short name, a strong colour and a sign that can be seen from the escalator.

Up close, the identity moves onto smaller things: the cup, the cone sleeve, the spoon, the napkin, the take-home tub and the paper bag. These are the pieces that leave the shop, and they often carry the brand further than the storefront does. The counter itself, with its freezer cases, mixing stations or display glass, is part of the show.

Each guide in this group looks at who started the name, who owns it now, and how its signs, cups, characters and packaging have been described in dated sources, and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

Tile, glass and the smell of baking.

The opening store set out much of what the brand still trades on. Seattle Met describes striped awnings and a blue-and-white tile facade right at the entrance to the SeaTac food court, an unusual three-sided stall, and a glass partition placed so that passing holiday shoppers would stop to watch staff mix and roll the dough and spread the frosting on the finished rolls. A pink neon sign hung over the counter on opening day, and the staff wore white blouses with black neckties. Greg Komen, quoted by the magazine from a later speech, summed up the siting strategy: “We have to get in your way.” The scent of baking was part of the plan from the start; Rich Komen had found T. J. Cinnamons by following the smell of butter and cinnamon through the Kansas City mall, to a counter whose owners had left the ceiling open so the aroma would spread.

Television gave the brand a second identity. In Breaking Bad, the lawyer Saul Goodman imagines himself managing “a Cinnabon in Omaha”, and the spin-off Better Call Saul opens its seasons with black-and-white scenes of him doing exactly that. Seattle Met says the production filmed in a working Cinnabon at Albuquerque’s Cottonwood Mall in June 2014, with Debbie Rowley, by then a company vice president of operations, training the actor Bob Odenkirk to mix, roll and frost and checking the script against company practice. Peter Gould, co-creator of the series, told the magazine that Cinnabon was his personal choice for the line because it was “a wonderful word to say.” Wikipedia records that the company’s president, Kat Cole, appeared on Undercover Boss in 2012.

The name also travels without the bakeries: in 2017 Seattle Met noted that Focus Brands licensed it onto cereal, coffee creamer and even candy canes.

For a design guide, Cinnabon shows how a coined name, a glass-fronted counter and the smell of baking can do the work of signage, and how a single mall bakery opened in December 1985 became a name that other companies’ products now carry. Compare it with Auntie Anne’s, its sister brand at GoTo Foods, and Carvel, the ice-cream brand Roark joined it with in 2004. For this guide we use tile blue, cinnamon brown and icing cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cinnabon’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.