Wake and Bake Donuts speaks out on backlash over social media post

CAROLINA BEACH, NC (WWAY) — The owner of a popular New Hanover County donut shop is speaking out after receiving backlash over a social media post.

On Monday, Wake and Bake Donuts posted an AI-generated image of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr with a donut in his hands on it’s Facebook page.

Owner Danny Tangredi said the image was just meant to show that the shop was open for the national holiday.

The post was shared in several large Facebook groups, including one with more than 1.6 million accounts in it, after which members of those groups began to leave angry or trolling reviews and comments.

Despite the negativity, he thinks many of the shop’s actual customers understood that the image wasn’t meant to mock MLK.

“I don’t think there’s really any room for anything other than donuts and light banter,” Tangredi said. “In terms of that post, that kind of caught us off guard that somebody would take the post and put it in a group and kind of target us. But I think most of our customers knew we were just trying to convey the fact that we were open and it was a holiday.”

Tangredi added that the backlash ended up backfiring, as the business and its social media posts are doing better than ever.

“But it obviously did a lot better than we expected. So I think more people knew that we were open that day than we expected to find out that we were open. We sold out, the sales have continued since that post and each post that we’ve had after that has had an increase in exposures.”

Tangredi said that this experience won’t change what the shop posts on its pages moving forward.