Breakfast Foods

Food

Battle of the griddle cakes

Published

January 5, 2026

This week we ask two questions about breakfast foods, Pancakes or Waffles and Sweet or Savory?

Pancakes vs. Waffles

Figure 1: Waffles vs Pancakes — counts and shares (N = 27).
Figure 2: Waffle chart: one square per vote (3×9 grid).

Sweet vs. Savory

Figure 3: Sweet vs Savory — counts and shares (N = 21).
Figure 4: Waffle chart: one square per vote (3×7 grid).

Poll Summary

Waffles vs Pancakes (N = 27): Pancakes lead 17–10 (about 63.0% vs 37.0%).

Sweet vs Savory (N = 21): Savory leads 13–8 (about 61.9% vs 38.1%).

In this week’s group, both questions leaned roughly 60/40 toward Pancakes and toward Savory.

Basic Stats

Lets check “is this clearly more than 50/50?” and “how big is the lead?”

question N Leader (votes) Trailer (votes) Leader share Margin (votes) Margin (points) p vs 50/50 Leader 95% CI Votes to flip winner
Waffles vs Pancakes 27 Pancakes (17) Waffles (10) 63.0% 7 25.9% 0.248 [0.42, 0.81] 4
Sweet vs Savory 21 Savory (13) Sweet (8) 61.9% 5 23.8% 0.383 [0.38, 0.82] 3
  • “p vs 50/50” is the two‑sided p‑value from an exact test; small values (like < 0.05) suggest the winner’s share is clearly above 50% in this sample.
  • “Leader 95% CI” is a plausible range for the leader’s true share if you repeated this kind of poll many times.
  • “Votes to flip winner” is the minimum number of people who’d need to switch from the leader to the trailer to change the outcome (a perfect tie isn’t possible here because both polls have an odd number of votes).

Both polls at a glance

Here’s a simple “leader share with 95% interval” for each question. It’s a quick way to see that both polls show a similar lean (roughly 60–65% for the winner).

Figure 5: Leader share with 95% confidence intervals for each poll.

Is there a connection between the two questions?

Short answer: we can’t directly tell, because we didn’t collect matched responses (i.e., we don’t know which Pancakes voters also picked Savory). But we can say a couple of useful things:

  • A quick bound, assuming the 21 Sweet/Savory voters were also among the 27 Waffles/Pancakes voters:
    • Pancakes + Savory overlap could be anywhere from 3 to 13 of those 21 people (14% to 62%).
    • Waffles + Sweet could be anywhere from 0 to 8 of those 21 people (0% to 38%).
    • Why these ranges? They’re just the largest and smallest overlaps that are mathematically possible given the totals (17 Pancakes, 10 Waffles; 13 Savory, 8 Sweet).
  • A “what‑if” check: If choices were independent (people pick Pancakes/Waffles and Sweet/Savory without a link), we’d expect roughly
    • Pancakes + Savory ≈ 39% of the overlapped voters (about 8 of 21)
    • Waffles + Sweet ≈ 14% (about 3 of 21). These sit comfortably inside the feasible ranges above.

Here’s a small visualization of those ranges, with a dot showing the “independent choices” expectation.

Figure 6: Feasible ranges if the 21 Sweet/Savory voters are a subset of the 27 Waffles/Pancakes voters. Dots show a simple ‘independent choices’ expectation.

Both polls tilt toward Pancakes and toward Savory. If many people answered both, we’d expect “Pancakes + Savory” to be more common than “Waffles + Sweet,” but the exact relationship needs matched responses to confirm. These two polls were taken in succession, not simultaneously. Different people may have voted in each question