America's sweet tooth is looking for a new chain obsession

The cupcake boom, a twenty-year dessert trend that once captivated the nation, ended with a thunk. However, America's sweet tooth doesn't retire — it just hunts for its next obsession.

When all of Sprinkles' stores abruptly closed at the end of 2025, a curtain dropped on an era. Not because the dessert chain, cofounded by pastry chef and entrepreneur Candace Nelson in 2005, was the biggest, but because it was the name-brand symbol of the nation's cupcake years.

Timing matters. As restaurant chains face higher costs and more cautious consumers who have less patience for one-note indulgences, the sudden disappearance of a once-dominant dessert brand underscores how little room there is for concepts that don't necessarily drive frequent repeat visits.

Asit Sharma, a senior investing analyst at The Motley Fool, put it bluntly: "Sprinkles Cupcakes just punched way beyond its weight in the public imagination than it ever did on the ground."

At its peak, Sprinkles had fewer than 100 stores, and yet, Sharma added, the brand got a lot of great press and "sometimes the perception is larger than the business."

Sprinkles is credited with being the world's first cupcake-only bakery, helping to popularize the craze that spawned dozens, if not hundreds, of copycats. Nelson, the founder, served as a permanent judge on the Food Network show "Cupcake Wars," further elevating her brand's status — and cementing her version of the handheld treats as the gold standard.

Still, the closure of Sprinkles, Sharma argued, wasn't shocking, since Nelson had sold her stake in the company to the private equity firm KarpReilly LLC in 2012.

"We know that expansion isn't always the first priority of a private equity firm when it takes over a chain; profits are, so that's not surprising," Sharma said.

The bigger takeaway for him wasn't just ownership — it was the cyclical fate of dessert fads.

The boom-and-bust cycle of dessert chains

"Dessert chains in particular are really prone to fads — frozen yogurt is a perfect example," Jonathan Maze, editor in chief of Restaurant Business, said.

"We've had two frozen yogurt booms, one in the 80s and 90s, and then one coming out of the Great Recession," Maze added. In the boom phase, he said, "You just get a lot of copycat concepts. They franchise. They start aggressively selling these locations."

Then the market turns, consumers move on to something else, and as quickly as they came, "they start declining." Gourmet doughnuts followed a similar trajectory in the late 2000s before cupcakes gained steam.

The cupcake trend, Maze said, although once promising, in part due to its early, pre-social media, viral appeal, "just didn't quite have the legs that people thought it did — but that happens fairly routinely."

Dessert spending remains significant. The $143.63 billion sweets market is projected to reach $193.56 billion by 2030, according to Research and Markets.

If Sprinkles' closing is a symbolic endpoint, the obvious question is what fills the gap. That question carries new weight in a tighter economy, where consumers are increasingly choosy about when — and how often — they treat themselves.

Sharma's immediate answer: "I think it's got to be the international bakery craze." He described noticing both Korean and Vietnamese concepts start to crop up across both coasts — with brands like Paris Baguette, 85°C Bakery Cafe, and Tous les Jours trending online and growing their footprints nationwide.

Nothing Bundt Cakes also shows promise as a contender to become the next "it" sweet after years of being a quiet hit. Maze described the Nothing Bundt Cakes as "one of the best-performing and most consistent restaurant chains in the country," having steadily grown to over 700 locations since its 1997 founding.

The company, which had the most positive review sentiment for quality and taste of all food brands on Yelp's "Most Loved Brands of 2025" list, is on track to open 1,000 units by 2027.

Maze, meanwhile, thinks cookies have an advantage that cupcakes and fro-yo never fully did: they're an everyday treat that doesn't require a dedicated occasion to enjoy. That accessibility has led to names like Crumbl, Insomnia Cookies, and Levain Bakery gaining momentum quickly.

"Cookies are actually pretty fascinating, to be perfectly honest," Maze said. The format, he argued, can be resilient, and crucially, "it's not a major investment to get yourself a cookie."

He also credited Insomnia Cookies' model for creating specific demand after the brand designed its own occasion — late-night cookie cravings — and answered the make-or-break question for any specialty dessert chain: how often will customers really show up?

"The biggest challenge with that sector by a long shot is that you only get a Blizzard or doughnuts so often," Maze said.

That constraint — how often people realistically want dessert — is what ultimately determines which chains endure and which burn out. When too many concepts flood the market offering the same product for the same narrow occasion, the model goes stale, no matter how beloved the brand once was.

That dynamic is what doomed frozen yogurt, dulled the cupcake boom, and now leaves the dessert category in a moment of reshuffling, as chains chase recipes that feel special enough to justify the splurge in a stretched economy. What comes next — cookies, international bakeries, bundt cakes, or something still incubating on TikTok — will face the same test.