Donut Hotspotting in Long Beach (with Yelp’s Help)
If you have ever spent time driving down the streets of Los Angeles, you may have been struck by the donut shops that seem to line every road. They may have enticed you with their the neon “OPEN” signs, calling your name, promising doughy goodness. Long Beach, population 470,000, is home to an unusually high number of the donut shops in Los Angeles. Why does a city that makes up just one-percent of Los Angeles county’s area have so many of LA’s donut shops? This phenomenon feels similar to seeing Starbucks on every street corner in places like San Francisco or Seattle. You really can’t avoid donuts in Long Beach — but would you want to?
As Pink Box Stories dives deeper into the stories of Cambodian-owned donut shops, our team recognized the need to better understand the scale and scope of this phenomenon. Long Beach is the seventh biggest city in California, and 39th in the US. While 40% of America’s Cambodian-heritage population resides in California, almost 20% reside in Long Beach. Put another way, 8% of America’s Cambodians live in Long Beach. One in twenty Long Beach residents is of Cambodian descent.
This population results from the events of the late 1970s, when many Cambodians found their way to America as refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge. Many Cambodian immigrants reunited and restarted their lives together in Long Beach. The impressive donut shop density here may be credited to one entrepreneurial Cambodian refugee in particular: Ted Ngoy. Ngoy — who we have written about before — found success entering into the donut business on his own. He soon passed down his knowledge to other Cambodian families and helped them self-start their own donut shops, kickstarting the Cambodian-donut culture that we know in California today. Eventually he would come to be known as the “Donut King.”
While donut enthusiasts may know Southern California as a donut shop hotspot, no single map or database of independent donut shops in California exists. So, I set out to create my own map of all the donut shops in a given geographical location.
As a starting point, I enlisted the help of Yelp’s API. (An API stands for “application program interface”; with limits, it allows us to access Yelp’s data and tweak it for our specific purpose.) I wrote a Python script that utilized Yelp’s API to identify and locate all the donut shops in the city of Long Beach. The query returned 200 results under “Best Match,” the default category from the API. According to the Yelp API guidelines, best match “considers multiple input parameters to return the most relevant results.”
My script parsed through the review counts, ratings, and pricing information for each business that matched the alias, or our category of choice, “Donut”. Because I initially wanted to focus on Long Beach donut shops, the code filtered the results to show only businesses whose coordinates were within the City of Long Beach and had an alias, “donut.” The code returned 43 entries. I noted a small shortcoming in the information Yelp returned — the API may lag on updated information as businesses change hands, fall under, or recently start.
Armed with new data, I could weave together information with entries such as pricing, ratings and even reviews. The data revealed patterns, some that were expected, and some that brought a unique perspective to the donut scene in Southern California.
Out of the 43 donut shops in the area that we pulled from the Yelp API, 37 were independent and six were chain stores. The data show that independent donut shops in Long Beach are much better received by Yelp users than franchise locations of chain stores like Krispy Kreme and Winchell’s. Average ratings for the chain restaurants was a 2.6, compared to 4.2 for non-chain restaurants. In fact, only three of the independent shops scored lower (3.0) than the highest-scoring chain restaurant (3.5). Although the average rating count for the chain restaurants were higher (72.4 vs 51.3), the the top two independent donut shops had more reviews than all of the chain stores combined (707 vs 362).
Reviews hinted at consumer preferences toward independent stores. For example, Paul S. from Calgary describes Broadway Donuts as “fantastic and much better than any chain.” In another case, Hmong S. from Cerritos sets chains as the bare standard, describing Simone’s Donuts to “exceed all donut chains by far.” And although I was unable to determine the ethnicity of all store owners, the reviews of at least three shops pointed to the owners being Cambodian, which aligns with the strong correlation between donut shop and Cambodian heritage owners.
The history of the Cambodian community in California and the culture that surrounds donuts seems to support the numbers returned from our deep dive. The significance of the donut shop, which gave livelihoods to thousands of Cambodian refugees, can be seen in the pervasive numbers of donut shops in Long Beach, an area where many Cambodian families made their homes. Yelp’s API helped us with a proof-of-concept and is the starting point for Pink Box Stories to get a data-driven picture of Cambodian donuts shops in California.
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