Somewhere in 2021 or 2022 I created the Raleigh and Washington DC Donut maps. I posted what I had created on Reddit and one of the first comments I got was that I shouldn’t have wasted my time and made a fried chicken map instead.
What a time to be alive.
Here we are 5 or 6 or some amount of years later, in 2026, with a new, glorious set of Raleigh Donut Maps. The lack of fried chicken maps still make my heart weep, but we soldier on.
I started this project before AI was common. The amount of digging I did to find and share all of the local donut vendors we have in and around Raleigh is straight up bananas to me now. Hours and hours of work, interacting with folks online, and going out to test out new donut places. Fully worth it, we made a ton of friends, but keeping up with these ventures can be difficult. We dropped off for a bit, I don’t think I’ve updated instagram in at least a year, but we’re back.
For full transparency, this new website was built using Claude. The donut maps were not and our donut data isn’t either. A software engineer and a web accessibility analyst got together, had a baby, and apparently it ended up looking like the page you’re currently navigating. We worked from sketches in notebooks, tweaked everything to make it easier to navigate with a screen reader and keyboard, and generally tried to keep things clean and easy.
The Raleigh Donut Maps are built out on Google Maps and also presented as a handy website list. The maps and list both have filters you can use and a handy search tool. We did our best to update the maps with any new locations. If there’s a spot we missed, you can mosey over to our contact form or email us at hello@doughnut-days.com.
It’s nice to be back online. I hope these maps make your life a little sweeter.