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Pumpkin takes top pie as HPU poll goes national

88.5 WFDD - Public Radio For The Piedmont | By Paul Garber

Published November 26, 2025 at 8:13 AM EST

Sweet pumpkin pie decorated with whipped cream overhead shot with copy space

High Point University has conducted a national and statewide poll of holiday pie preferences, and pumpkin is the clear winner.

Twenty-eight percent of national respondents and 23 percent of North Carolinians picked pumpkin as their favorite.

Apple, pecan and sweet potato were among the next picks for both Tar Heel and U.S. pie consumers.

The pie with the biggest difference between state and national results was sweet potato. North Carolinians chose it 16 percent of the time, six points higher than the national rate.

Pumpkin has been the number one pie for North Carolinians since 2021.

This is the first time that High Point University researchers have taken their annual pie poll to the national level.

Paul Garber

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

See stories by Paul Garber