America’s doughnut capital. Can we stop at just one?

by Alyssa Fowers

For this story, I requested a list of every donut shop listing in the United States from Yelp. (The Washington Post insists on spelling it “doughnut” in the headline, but I can spell it correctly as “donut” on my own website.) I cleaned and analyzed the data to evaluate the donut density of different areas of the country, what brands were most prevalent in which places, and what was advertised alongside donuts in shop names. One of the big challenges of this story was figuring out how to show geographic information while respecting Yelp’s condition that readers could not back-calculate raw numbers from the story. I solved this by using Public-Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs), a little-known geographic unit that divides the U.S. into blocks with about 100,000 people living in each.

The story named three doughnut capitals: Providence for sheer density, Salt Lake City for variety, and Dallas for the best balance of the two.

Critical research at the Reston, VA Mochinut (sadly closed)