a long oneWhere the shops actually are
also: donuts per capita · the density map
Donut shops are not spread evenly, and the places with the most of them are not the places with the most famous ones.
The one published American figure
The Providence metropolitan area has been cited as having the most donut shops per capita in the United States: 25.3 shops per 100,000 people, as of 13 January 2010. Rhode Island is 48th by area among the states.
Canada has the highest concentration of donut shops per capita in the world and eats the most donuts per head; Japan is second by concentration. Over 4,600 Tim Hortons locations do most of that work.
What this site can count, and what it cannot
This directory counts what OpenStreetMap records, on the date it was fetched, plus the shops written up here. That is a count of a map, not a census of a trade. Shops open and close faster than any map keeps up with, and a shop that nobody has added to OpenStreetMap is invisible to it.
The number to compare against — an actual national count of independent donut shops — does not exist in a form this project can cite. KQED's 2021 figure of more than 5,000 independent shops in California alone is the largest sourced number here, and it is one state.
The map
/places/ draws every row on one map. /numbers/ counts them by state and by distance. Chains are marked as chains, because OpenStreetMap records a brand when a place has one, and can be taken off the map in a click.
The particulars
| kind | map |
|---|---|
| region | The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Doughnut shop — Wikipedia · link
- Why Donuts + Chinese Food = A Very Californian Combination — Asal Ehsanipour, 2021 · link
- Doughnut — Wikipedia · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.