The Hole Truth: Britain’s Doughnut Holes Are a Price-Per-Gram Swindle

There is a particular kind of British outrage that arrives quietly, usually in a supermarket aisle, usually while holding a small paper bag that costs more than it should. It is the outrage of realising you have paid £2.50 for something called a ‘doughnut hole’ and received neither a hole nor a sensible price per gram. Welcome to the hole-sale.

Let us be clear from the off: Glazed & Confused is not anti-hole. We are pro-hole. The hole is the doughnut’s greatest architectural feature, a doughy Odeon of negative space. But the commercial doughnut hole is a different beast. It is not the punched-out centre of a ring doughnut. It is, in most cases, a small fried ball of dough that has been given a name designed to make us feel like we are buying the bit that should logically be free. It is absence with a barcode. It is the pastry equivalent of paying extra for a window seat and being handed a brick.

The bit that isn’t there

The first thing to understand is that the doughnut hole is a fiction twice over. Geometrically, a hole has no mass. Commercially, the ‘hole’ you buy is not a hole at all but a dough ball, often the same dough as the ring, just smaller and less burdened by responsibility. The industry has taken a by-product-shaped idea and sold it back to us as a premium snack. That is not baking. That is branding with icing sugar on top.

We took eight supermarket bags of ‘doughnut holes’ and weighed them on a kitchen scale that once belonged to a drug dealer in Lewisham. The results were not pretty. Several bags contained more air than a Brexit promise. One bag lost 11g to ‘settling’ before we had even opened it. Another described itself as ‘sharing size’, which felt optimistic given that sharing it would have caused a family argument.

The baker’s defence

I rang Marta, a baker in Peckham who has made doughnuts for a decade and who sounded genuinely tired of this question. ‘We don’t punch holes out of rings and sell the circles,’ she said. ‘That’s not how it works. We make balls. The name is a lie with icing.’

Marta explained that doughnut holes are cheaper to produce per unit, easier to fry in bulk and almost impossible to make badly enough that people stop buying them. ‘A ring doughnut is a performance,’ she said. ‘It has to rise, it has to hold its shape, it has to look like a doughnut. A hole just has to exist. And even then, some of them fail.’

She conceded that the pricing is ‘a bit cheeky’. ‘If you buy a bag of holes, you are buying labour and oil and a paper bag. But you are also buying the story that these are the missing bits. They are not. They are the bits that never had a hole in the first place.’

The mathematician’s verdict

Dr Priya, a mathematician who asked me not to use her surname because she has colleagues who take doughnuts seriously, was more direct. ‘A ring doughnut is a torus,’ she said. ‘Its hole has volume but no mass. When retailers sell “doughnut holes”, they are selling mass with a hole-based story. That is not geometry. That is marketing.’

She ran the numbers. A standard supermarket ring doughnut, 60g, at 85p, costs about 1.42p per gram. A 100g bag of doughnut holes at £2.50 costs 2.50p per gram. That is a 76% premium for something that sounds like it should be free. ‘If you bought a bag of air and called it a hole, you would be arrested,’ she said. ‘If you buy a bag of dough and call it a hole, you get a spot on the shelf next to the croissants.’

Colin from Swindon has had enough

Colin, 54, from Swindon, is the mildly furious shopper we all deserve. He bought a bag of doughnut holes for his grandson’s birthday and has not stopped thinking about it since. ‘I thought I was buying the holes,’ he said. ‘I got 14 little balls and a lot of air. My ring doughnut was £1.10 and had a hole in it. This bag cost £2.50 and had no hole at all. Explain the economics.’

We could not explain the economics. We tried. We drew a diagram. The diagram looked like a doughnut, which felt appropriate and unhelpful.

The ranking: value and structural integrity

We scored each bag on value (price per gram) and structural integrity (how many pieces survived the journey home without becoming dust). Scores are out of 10. The results are a damning indictment of modern Britain, or at least of modern Britain’s snack aisle.

Rank	Supermarket offering	Price / weight	Value score	Structural integrity
1	Lidl Baker’s Selection Doughnut Bites	£1.29 / 200g	9	8
2	Aldi Specially Selected Doughnut Holes	£1.49 / 180g	8	7
3	Asda Doughnut Bites	£1.50 / 150g	7	6
4	Morrisons The Best Doughnut Holes	£1.75 / 140g	6	7
5	Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Doughnut Bites	£2.00 / 120g	5	8
6	Tesco Finest Doughnut Holes	£2.25 / 110g	4	6
7	Co-op Irresistible Doughnut Bites	£2.50 / 100g	3	5
8	Iceland Doughnut Holes	£2.00 / 90g	2	3

The Lidl bag is the only one that feels like a fair deal. The Iceland bag is a cautionary tale: 90g of dough, £2, and a structural integrity score that suggests the contents were transported by being kicked down a staircase. The Co-op bag is delicious, which is the problem. It proves that price and pleasure are only loosely related, and that the hole remains the most profitable lie in pastry.

The hole truth

The doughnut hole is not a scandal because it is expensive. Plenty of things are expensive. It is a scandal because it pretends to be the opposite. It pretends to be the offcut, the spare part, the bit that fell out of the machine. It is sold with a wink, as if we are all in on the joke. But the joke is priced per gram, and the joke is on us.

So here is the Glazed & Confused manifesto: buy the ring. Eat the hole for free. It is the only zero-cost offcut in Britain, and it comes with a doughnut attached. The hole is not a product. It is a hole. Let us treat it with the respect it deserves, which is none, and the price it deserves, which is nothing.