A needlessly serious map of how Germany’s bakery Brezeln (“pretzels”) hold their arms.
This started as a heated debate among friends: are the “arms” of a Brezel at the top or the bottom? We knew the same question had sparked debate years earlier and suspected there were regional differences, but we had never seen a detailed map. Thanks to OpenStreetMap, DINOv2, and Gemma 4, we could finally settle it. It turns out we simply grew up in different regions.
Orientation by state
Classification coverage
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How it works
Bakery locations and their available brand links come from OpenStreetMap. For each bakery identity, the crawler searches linked websites and Wikidata for up to four distinct, information-rich logos, signs, or storefront images; tiny, blank, and duplicate images are discarded. Gemma 4 assesses each image independently, while DINOv2-derived visual comparisons and manually labelled examples help calibrate the result. The image-level decisions are combined into one brand vote, and manual corrections always take precedence.
The translucent territories simulate circular colonies growing simultaneously from classified Brezel bakeries. Each front expands at the same speed and stops locally when it meets another colony, producing nearest-seed areas clipped to Germany. They visualise which classified bakery is geographically closest—not service areas, market boundaries, or administrative regions.
How much should you trust it?
This is an exploratory map, not a definitive bakery census. OpenStreetMap can be incomplete or outdated, websites do not always expose a useful logo, and a brand’s appearance may have changed over time. Branches usually inherit one shared brand result, while imperfect names and links can occasionally split or merge identities. Automated image selection and classification can still be fooled by decorative Brezeln, food photographs, or unclear rotations. Manually reviewed examples improve quality, but coverage is uneven—so the broad regional pattern is more trustworthy than any single point.
Bakery locations © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Basemaps © CARTO Voyager and Dark Matter. State geometry © EuroGeographics for the administrative boundaries via Eurostat GISCO NUTS 2024. Images remain at their cited sources.