Who bakes the best chocolate chip cookie in the Triangle? Readers pick a winner
The sweet taste of the Triangle’s best chocolate chip cookies? Turns out, it’s found beneath a Raleigh chiropractor’s office.
After a sugary search based on our readers’ recommendations, one local bakery has crumbled the competition with the sweet victory of winning the most votes for the best chocolate chip cookies in the area.
The Triangle’s food scene is full of delicious dessert shops, cafes and restaurants where you can satisfy your cookie cravings.
And luckily, the best of the best, though based in Raleigh, ships its fan-favorite sweets all over the country.
Best chocolate chip cookies in the Triangle: Southern Sugar Bakery
Location: 4517 Lead Mine Road, Suite B, Raleigh, NC 27612
For nearly a decade, Southern Sugar Bakery has been dishing out decorative sugar cookies, classic flavors and custom cakes; not in a traditional retail bakery space, but in the garden level below Crabtree Chiropractic Center.
The Raleigh-based cookie company has been a full-time venture for friends Angie Tucker and Christin Snyder since 2015.
But the duo’s rich history as business partners goes back a year before then, when they were both pursuing careers as school counselors.
They met in 2005 when Tucker was Snyder’s high school Bible study group leader, The News & Observer previously reported, and a few years later, their friendship led to Snyder working as her counseling intern.
That’s when baking, on a large scale, unexpectedly came into the picture.
After baking batches of cookies as a hobby for family and friends, Snyder, 24 at the time, agreed to take on the role of making around 250 for someone’s wedding.
“At that time, I’d been making maybe a dozen or two at a time so I was like, ‘Of course I could do that.’ Then later I was like, ‘What did I commit to,’” Snyder told The N&O this week. “So I remember walking to Angie’s office like, ‘Angie. You’ve got to help me take this through because I’m freaking out a little bit.’”
Though she’d never baked anything from scratch before, Tucker, then 32, was game and the two teamed up for three consecutive days baking Snyder’s custom sugar cookies.
That’s when Tucker’s “wheels started spinning” and she had the idea to turn Snyder’s hobby into a summer side hustle.
That was the beginning of their baking business, run after school in Tucker’s home.
“We were in my kitchen for three years doing this at night. So we were school counselors by day, bakers by night,” Tucker, now 45, explained.
While Snyder, now 36, says she never before could have imagined opening a business, it wasn’t long before they took on baking full-time.
“By the end of those three years, we had so much business that we just could not keep up with both of our lives — school counseling jobs, her family and the cookie business,” she said.
“So it kind of came to a crossroads where we were like, ‘What do we do? We’ve got to decide what we are going to choose to do.’”
That’s when they moved out of Tucker’s kitchen and officially opened Southern Sugar Bakery in a commercial kitchen space in the building home to Crabtree Chiropractic Center — which is owned by Snyder’s father.
Back then, in the summer of 2015, they only had an Instagram, Facebook and a Gmail account to take custom orders.
Coming up on a decade in business, the duo has a team of 23 employees, a couple hundred dozen cookies going out each week and the bragging rights of the best chocolate chip cookies in the Triangle.
What goes into ‘the best chocolate chip cookies?’
Full of sweet and savory flavors, the bakery’s sea salt chocolate chip cookies are prepared with flecks of sea salt and premium chocolate, available by half-dozen or a dozen. You can also bake them at home with Southern Sugar Bakery’s packaged dry cookie mix, which only requires one egg and one stick of butter.
“It’s super humbling [to be voted for best chocolate chip cookies] because I know it would not have been possible without the people that love us,” Tucker told The N&O.
“I do believe we have a great product but there are probably a lot of stores out here that have great products... But we have people that just believe in us and always have since my kitchen,” Tucker said.
Looking back at their success that stemmed from a part-time passion for baking, Snyder says it all feels surreal.
“Just to see, not only how much the bakery has changed and how it has evolved and just organically grown, but I think to see how Angie and I have changed — what the bakery has made us into, even as people and as women, as bosses,” she said.
Finalist for best chocolate chip cookies in the Triangle: Bestow Baked Goods
Location: 4208 Lassiter Road, Holly Springs, NC 27540
Similarly, the spot that came in second in voting for the Triangle’s best chocolate chip cookie was also created out of an educator’s love for baking.
Before opening Bestow Baked Goods, owner Heather Sutton’s sweet tooth got her hooked on the hobby. But it turned into much more than that after her KitchenAid mixer and her Robicelli’s cupcake cookbook had her regularly delivering baked goods to coworkers at Wake County Public Schools.
“We were buying like giant, 50 pound bags of flour and sugar at Costco for our house and my husband was like, ‘You know, this isn’t a hobby anymore and you need to do something with it.’”
That was in 2014. Three years later, she was sharing her specialty sweets on Cultivate Coffee Roasters’ menu and eventually became a wedding cake vendor for Highgrove Estate.
Sutton was in the process of moving on to a bigger space of her own about the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“We were in the middle of construction at the beginning of 2020. ... I remember seeing places shutting down and we were trying to open,” Sutton told The N&O. “We had already signed a lease, we had already started construction, we had a construction loan. It wasn’t like we could go, “‘Oh, just kidding. There’s a global pandemic. We’re backing out.’ We were in it.”
Through the uncertainty of what would unfold, she opened her bakery that summer and it’s been successful ever since for its cakes, cupcakes and cookies, including the chocolate chip — one of Bestow’s most popular menu items. She sells about 16 to 24 chocolate chip cookies a day a during the week and about 35 to 45 a day on weekends.
“In my early days, I was convinced it was just gonna be me and my amazing mixer and an oven ... Now I have a whole team of wonderful people in here that make what we do possible everyday,” she said.
“We’ve grown by the grace of God and I don’t say that as a platitude. I don’t have the experience and the knowledge and the degrees in business...Like there’s no other reason that we should be here at five years so I’m grateful for that.”
Pulling from Sutton’s preference, her chocolate chip cookie recipe is made to be a soft and chewy cookie with a little bit of a crunch around the outside, made with a lot of butter and a bit more brown sugar.
“I am from the area so it’s cool to have one of the best chocolate chip cookies in the area... I think my favorite thing about owning a business is having the customer that’s like, ‘I needed my chocolate chip cookie fix,’” she said.
“That’s probably the best feeling, knowing that it’s something that people look forward to, because that’s where it started for me. I did it for fun and it felt good to share it with other people so it feels good to know that even though it’s a business now and not a hobby, it’s still something that brings people joy.”
This story was originally published May 30, 2025 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Who bakes the best chocolate chip cookie in the Triangle? Readers pick a winner."
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