Sprinkles Cupcakes, the bakery that helped turn cupcakes into a national obsession, appears to be shutting down all of its brick-and-mortar locations nationwide. The company, founded in 2005, currently operates about 20 bakeries across six states and Washington, D.C. If reports from employees are accurate, the ovens go dark on Dec. 31.
Sprinkles has not issued an official announcement, but an employee reached at the company’s D.C. location confirmed that all stores are expected to close by the end of the year. Similar accounts from other markets say the bakeries will permanently shut their doors at 8 p.m. local time. The company’s online ordering system tells the same story: orders are available for New Year’s Eve only, with “no times available” starting Jan. 1, 2026.
What happens next is murkier. Sprinkles still lists 25 of its signature Cupcake ATMs around the country, the pink kiosks that once felt like the future of dessert retail. Whether those machines will remain stocked—or quietly disappear—remains unclear.
The silence from corporate has been matched by noise on social media. Comment sections on Sprinkles’ recent posts are filled with angry and stunned employees claiming they were given just one day’s notice before losing their jobs. “Cupcakes are sweet. One-day layoff notices are not,” one commenter wrote. Another accused the company of using workers through the holiday rush and then discarding them.
Founder Candace Nelson, who sold Sprinkles to private equity in 2012, addressed the closure in an Instagram post Wednesday, saying she learned only days ago that the bakery doors were closing. “I have no ownership or operational involvement,” she wrote, “but it’s surreal to see this chapter come to a close—and not how I imagined the story would unfold.”
In the accompanying video, Nelson sounded less like a former executive and more like a creator watching her idea vanish. “I thought Sprinkles would keep growing and be around forever,” she said. “I thought it was going to be my legacy.” Instead, one of the defining brands of the cupcake boom appears to be ending not with a celebration, but with a countdown clock and a lot of unanswered questions.
