Every year, the New Zealand Pie Awards crown the country’s best pies. Bakers from all New Zealand over compete for gold, silver, and bronze across a range of categories, from the classic steak and cheese to vegan options and sweet treats. It’s a fun part of Kiwi culture which Kiwis take very seriously. Some people even go for road trips to try these pies! Admittedly, they are my favourite pies, with a flaky top but a solid bottom that holds its shape whilst you munch your way through. Delicious!
While the awards website lists all the winners, it felt like the information could be easier (and more fun) to explore. So, I built something to fix that: an interactive dashboard that maps out every award-winning bakery. You can see where they’re based, what pies they’re famous for, and even filter by year, pie type, and award ranking.
Why a dashboard?
Scrolling through long lists of winners is fine, but I wanted a way to make the results more useful, something you could actually use to plan a pie-inspired road trip, or quickly check who’s dominating in your local area. A map felt like the natural solution, so that’s what I built.
How it works
I scraped the results from the Pie Awards website, geocoded the bakery locations using Google’s Geocoding API, and cleaned up the data before pulling it into a simple CSV.
The dashboard itself is built with Dash in Python, which handles the interactive map and filtering. When you choose a year, type of pie, or award level, the map updates instantly to show only the bakeries that match. Hovering over a marker shows all the awards that bakery has won based on your filters, so you can get a quick overview without clicking around.
The whole thing is hosted on Render.com, so you can use it from anywhere without installing anything. Since I am using the free tier of Render, loading the dashboard may take a few minutes, but it will load.
Give it a try
You can explore the live dashboard here. If you’re curious about how it was built, I’ve also made the dashboard code available here.
This was a fun way to take something as straightforward as a list of pie awards and make it a bit more interactive, and hopefully a little more useful for anyone interested in New Zealand’s best bakeries. Whether you’re a fellow data enthusiast or just someone on the hunt for the best steak and cheese, I hope it helps you discover somewhere new.
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