The NunBun

This is the complete, behind-the-scenes true story of how a cinnamon bun that looked like Mother Teresa became a world-wide sensation.

The Immaculate Confection or Cinnamon Sacrilege? 

On Christmas Day, in 1996, Bongo Java became the most famous coffee house in the world. And while some stars get only 15 minutes of fame, Bongo Java radiated for much longer. 

The Discovery

Sometime during September of 1996, a long-time employee of Bongo Java was about to bite into his breakfast when he noticed that the confection in his hand kinda, sorta looked like Mother Teresa. Instead of biting her head off, he put the sweet aside and instead, reached for a muffin.

He spent his shift asking customers and staff whether they saw a face staring back at them from the roll. An informal poll favored the idea that the bun took after Mother Teresa, winning by a thin margin over the idea that the bun looked like, well, a bun.

The staff immediately named it the Immaculate Confection, and began to refer to the bun as “her.” They preserved her by keeping the bun in the freezer, only taken out for special customers and those who knew to ask. Eventually she was shellac’d and placed into a shrine composed of a spray-painted, thrift store box and some red and green Christmas lights.

The NunBun was taking on a life of her own. A few people on staff put together a 15-minute mockumentary and in November, a legendary release party was held. The free event, held in the upstairs of Bongo Java, sold out immediately. Two more showings took place that evening, and the film was left on a continuous loop over the weekend. 300 or so people came to see it, including one priest, two nuns, and a Grammy-winning singer dressed as a sister. 

The First 15 Minutes of Fame

Some believe the NunBun was a publicity stunt dreamt up by a coffee house owner with a checkered past in journalism and a love for Monty Python. If this were true, he missed out on a lucrative career in PR. The NunBun’s ascension to fame was as organic as our beans.

Two media outlets were called post-discovery. We tried (several times) to get The Tennessean to run the story. Numerous requests were made to one of their journalists, who also happened to be a loyal Bongo Java customer. Only after their rejection did we call a tabloid. 

Our Christmas gift in 1996 was our first 15 minutes of fame. After months of saying no, The Tennessean needed a Christmas Day story - so they ran a piece on the NunBun. The article ran on a Saturday. By Monday, the NunBun had gone viral. 

The story was picked up by The Tennessean’s parent company, Gannet, who ran it on the front page of their national paper, USA Today. Which, in the late-90s, was the way morning DJs found the best news for their program. After this, both Bongo Java and Bongo Java Roasting Co. were overrun with requests for interviews - nearly every phone in the company rang off the hook, well into the evening. 

30 Minutes of Fame

We rode our second wave of fame when a letter from Mother Teresa, and a call from her attorney, reached our desks.

Somewhere in the midst of our first 15 minutes of stardom, a call from someone claiming to be Mother Teresa’s attorney came in. This wasn’t taken seriously, because we also received calls from folks claiming to be Dan Rather, Howard Stern, and staff from the Office of the President. Jim Towey, the attorney, understood the craziness we were facing and said he’d call back in a few days. And he did.
Mr. Towey explained that Bongo Java could not use the name Mother Teresa Cinnamon Bun, or use the bun’s image on merchandise, without her permission. She did not allow anyone to use her image for profit, even the group she oversaw, Missionaries of Charity. This was backed-up by a letter from Mother Teresa herself. 

Bongo Java then hired a $300/hr attorney to better understand trademark and copyright laws - an expense that proved somewhat useful when Bob went on Fox’s Burden of Proof to debate Mr. Towey. We quickly learned that the term Mother Teresa Cinnamon Bun was off-limits and agreed to cease its use on merchandise, with the exception of the 36 shirts we’d just printed. However, Bongo Java learned something else from this endeavor: Mr. Towey’s claim that Bongo couldn’t use the image of the bun meant that he was making the legal argument that it truly was her image on the confection. Bongo realized they could do whatever they wanted with the image, and promptly printed a new run of shirts with a colorized image, replacing Mother Teresa’s name with the term Immaculate Confection. This did not help the issue at hand.

We eventually reached a compromise with Mr. Towey. We agreed to limit sales of Bun-branded items to $100,000 a year (an amount at least 10 times more than has been sold since 1996), and to cease using the term Immaculate Confection. Mother Teresa’s team agreed to the term NunBun - we have no clue why they found this more acceptable than Immaculate Confection.

45 Minutes of Fame - The Break-In

The NunBun was stolen on Christmas Eve, 2005 - Eight years and 354 days after her news cycle debut. A bun burglar took our front door off its hinges, walked into the café, and stole nothing but the holy snack. 

This triggered a third media storm that unfortunately coincided with our owner’s first Christmas as a married man, moving the celebration from his house, to the café, where he waited for the police. Keith Olbermann asked us if we ever thought it had been divinely lifted to the heavens, To which Bob replied, “Well, if it did, then there likely would have been a hole in our roof instead of a front door off its hinges.” 

Many theories regarding the bun’s disappearance have arisen over the years, but nothing has been proven. There’s still a $5,000 no-questions-asked reward for her safe return. 

Facts, Questions, and Anecdotes

The internet was brand new when the NunBun popped up. 1995 is considered the year the web became commercialized, and 1998 the year the first major news story broke online (Bill Clinton’s indiscretions), and Google was launched. 

So it wasn’t surprising when a customer suggested a web page for the NunBun and Bob responded with, “a what?”

Fortunately, Bob is hip with it, and http://www.qecmedia/nunbun became a thing. The site, complete with a morph of Mother Teresa turning into the bun and back, got over 1,000,000 hits in 30 days. At least that’s how we remember it. Even in the day of instant celebrities and viral cats, those stats are still a big deal. Over time, the NunBun wove herself deeper into our social fabric. Paul Shaffer (The David Letterman Show) did a song and dance on how great America is because we can find celebrities in our food.

The NunBun Saga has been so full of misinformation and strangeness, that we’ve compiled a handy list of facts, questions, and anecdotes below:

• This was NOT a publicity stunt!
• If the bun had resembled anyone else, would it have been such a big deal?
• Many clergy members paid the bun a visit - the typical reaction was laughter.
• We did receive a slew of letters accusing us of doing the devil’s work. They were so full of wrong information (including the part about the Devil; he’s one of the few that didn’t call) that we did not take them seriously.
• The reporter who broke the NunBun story in The Tennessean fled Nashville and changed his name.
• Jim Towley, Mother Teresa’s attorney, became the Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under the Bush administration.
• A then-local radio reporter, who had bothered to visit the shrine, interview staff, and talk to long-time customers went on-air and said something along the lines of, “I don’t know. A sweet roll that looks like Mother Teresa in a coffeehouse with a Jewish owner? Seems sorta unseemly to me.” He was fired soon after for saying something even more stupid.
• Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997 – almost exactly one year after the NunBun was discovered.

And Bob’s favorite NunBun tales:

• Shortly before her death, Mother Teresa met with her Missionaries of Charity successor and her attorney, who told us this story, to settle some items. This included the proposed NunBun merchandising agreement with Bongo Java. During the meeting, Mother Teresa smiled, pointed to her replacement and told her attorney “You tell them to find a cinnamon bun that looks like her.”
• The day Mother Teresa passed, Bob was attending a Tennessee Oilers game. He received a call and answered only because of the London area code. On the other end were her people, asking for a comment on her life. After pondering the absurdity of the request, and why he of all people was qualified to comment on this future saint’s life, he told the above story and said: I’m just glad that we were able to make her laugh.