I had to start from the beginning again, mostly because I couldn’t believe it. This man came to upstate New York from Africa and started a big-time tea company in a dying town in the middle of nowhere?

Yes, somehow, he had.

“I didn’t know about this area,” Okello confesses as he pumps gas into his car on Krakow’s Main Street. “A friend saw this advertisement for the mill building and we drove up here from New Jersey to see. Nobody else wanted this place. It was a very good deal. I think the bank thought so too, and that’s why they helped me buy it.” He smiles and waves to a family in a truck that has just pulled up.

Tea experts say that while there are plenty of tea companies that use leaves from Kenya, Majani is one of the finest. “It’s made a big name for itself selling purple tea,” says Abby Kyle, author of It’s All in the Leaves: A Tea Atlas. “You can only get it from Kenya, and until recently, nobody was selling it in the U.S. It’s got a wonderful flavor and amazing health benefits.”

Ask Okello his secret to success, he’ll tell you this: “Every day in business, we hit new problems. But if we keep our minds open, we always find a solution. Maybe it isn’t pretty or fancy. Maybe it’s not perfect, but it works. That’s what matters. Just find a way to make it work.”

Majani’s biggest problem now? Getting tea to everyone who wants it. “We’ve had a hard time keeping up with demand. But it’s a good problem to have, no? We must be doing something right.”

My knees were bouncing up and down.

Alhaadi Okello had saved a town with tea. Tea! Which is fine, but it’s basically just leaf-flavored water. There’s only so good tea can get, even if it is purple. If he could save Krakow with tea, why couldn’t I save Petersville with doughnuts?

And not only was Krakow like Petersville—Majani and The Doughnut Stop were both struggling with demand.

I scrolled down.

There was a photograph of Okello: a tall man with dark brown skin and a big smile wearing an apron and a shower cap and lifting the crank on a gleaming steel tank. The caption read, Okello demonstrates his new tea blending machine.

That’s when something clicked, and where there had been a big black hole, there was finally an idea.

I moved the cursor back up to the search box, typed in the words DOUGHNUT MACHINE, and held my breath.

And then it was right there in front of me, almost as if I had wished it to life: a doughnut robot.

The Belshaw Adamatic Donut Robot was the very first result.

Click.

I had never seen anything so beautiful. It was all stainless steel and shiny. It mixed. It fried. It glazed and injected. The Donut Robot did it all.

It made ninety-six dozen doughnuts an hour.

It was perfect. It was what I needed. It was what the town needed.