5 Local Bakeries I Keep Coming Back To For Cookies In Atlanta

As long as I can remember, I've had an insatiable sweet tooth. Sometimes I can't help feeling like I'll always be that little girl with her hands in the cookie jar. It's no surprise, then, that whenever I travel, I hunt down the best local bakeries. While cities such as New York are often celebrated for their iconic pastries, I'd argue that Atlanta, Georgia, where I've lived for the past 14 years and consider my "adopted hometown," deserves just as much recognition for its incredible cookies.

One of my closest friends has the same sweet tooth I do, and over the years, we've sampled enough cookies together that I feel fairly confident in ranking Atlanta's best. The places I'm sharing span different Atlanta neighborhoods, with the intention of giving travelers a reason to discover pockets of the city they might otherwise miss. While many visitors tend to make a beeline for Atlanta's famous syrupy carbonated beverage at the World of Coca-Cola, this cookie crawl offers a sweet way to experience another side of Atlanta and an alternative to one of its most overrated attractions.

One note on my methodology: when putting together this list, I focused on cookie spots within Atlanta city limits. There are plenty of fantastic cookie spots OTP ("outside the Perimeter" in Atlanta-speak, referring to the Interstate 285 loop), but for this article, I focused on bakeries located ITP (inside the Perimeter). 

I still remember when Sugar Shane's founder Shane Quillin personally delivered his not-yet-famous oversized stuffed cookies door to door in 2020. The former Amazon employee started baking as a side project, and my friend and I were among his earliest customers. He'd greet us at the door with a box of his crazy, colorful cookies, and we'd proceed to shamelessly stuff our faces. After his pandemic cookie deliveries proved to be mega-popular (so much so that he won the 2021 Judge's Choice Award Champion in the regional Dessert Wars competition), Quillin expanded his business across metro Atlanta. To this day, his most popular location is his original storefront, a kitchen concept in an alley behind a Subway and a halal grocery store near Georgia Tech in Midtown.

Some of Sugar Shane's most popular flavors include Dashing Delta, made with Biscoff and butterscotch with a creamy cookie butter center, as well as the Betty White with Golden Oreos and white chocolate chips. While the salted chocolate chip isn't stuffed, it's garnished with flaky sea salt for the perfect sweet-and-salty balance. The menu rotates weekly, so there's usually something new to try, and Shane has expanded beyond cookies into brownies, cinnamon rolls, and other desserts. He's also behind the new The Baking Social at The Battery Atlanta, opening in the fall, where guests can make treats and baked goods in hands-on classes.

I love these cookies so much that I even had Sugar Shane's cater a party where I celebrated 10 years of living in Atlanta, which Shane personally set up. Needless to say, the cookies were a major highlight of the night — even more than the libations, dare I say.

Since I live in Midtown Atlanta, I spend a lot of time wandering this walkable neighborhood with rooftop bites and green spaces. For years, though, I felt we were missing a really good cookie shop — and I'm not talking about chains such as Insomnia Cookies or Tiff's Treats, both of which are located here. In 2024, Fit For a Cookie opened in Politan Row — the food hall at the recently redeveloped Colony Square. I used to go to Colony Square for my French and German classes about a decade ago, back when the food court felt frozen in time from the 1970s (that's definitely not the case anymore). Fit For a Cookie has since become my go-to stop whenever I'm craving something sweet after walking around the neighborhood or finishing a run at nearby Piedmont Park.

Craig Bravo, the baker behind Fit For a Cookie, originally created a cult following at Georgia State University, where he carried duffel bags of his cookies around campus, before opening the stand at Politan Row. Similar to Sugar Shane's, Fit For a Cookie specializes in oversized cookies. Keep an eye out — depending on the one you choose, you can get a balance of gooey and crispy in the same bite if it has a thick center and flatter edges. It's the perfect middle ground when I can't decide between a thicker cookie and a thinner, crispier one. My favorite flavor is the Vanilla Bean Chocolate Chip, made with four kinds of chocolate chips. Fit For a Cookie has even caught the attention of celebrity chef Art Smith, Oprah Winfrey's former personal chef, and according to the bakery, Oprah's brother, Roosevelt Cartwright, is also a fan.

Now for something a little different. I don't only love stuffed cookies, and that's where Munster Cravings comes in. Located inside Chattahoochee Food Works in Atlanta's Upper Westside neighborhood, this bakery is "crazy for cookies," according to its website (we have a lot in common on that front), and it specializes in gourmet flat cookies, many of which are topped with frosting in a way that somewhat reminds me of cupcakes in a cookie form.

Some of my favorite flavors at Munster Cravings include the PB&J, a brown sugar cookie with peanut butter morsels and topped with peanut butter and grape jelly, as well as the Birthday Cake Cookie, topped with house-made buttercream frosting and sprinkles. Munster Cravings also offers vegan chocolate chip and snickerdoodle cookies that are free of dairy and nuts.

Founder Veronica Dalzon — who is self-taught — launched Munster Cravings at Tucker, Georgia's annual chili cook-off in 2019 before expanding to one of the original stalls at Chattahoochee Food Works. When the food hall opened in 2021, it was designed to give aspiring food entrepreneurs, including women and people of color, an easier way to grow their businesses. According to the Munster Cravings website, the cookies are "Ah freakin Mazing!!!!" — and I really couldn't describe them any better than that.

If it wasn't obvious by now, I love cookies of all kinds — including the mini ones from Alon's Bakery and Market. When I first moved to Atlanta in 2012, before trendy cookie shops started popping up, I stumbled across Alon's while looking for lunch in Sandy Springs (this location has since closed). After moving to intown Atlanta, I realized the original bakery was in the Morningside/Virginia-Highland neighborhood, a charming district with local boutiques, and I've kept going back for their mini pecan chocolate chip cookies. I shamelessly snack on them for days. These bite-sized treats have a caramelized texture balanced with chocolate chunks and pecans that sets them apart from any other cookie I've tried in Atlanta.

Executive chef Alon Balshan opened the original Morningside location in 1992, and the European-style bakery and market was also recently named Atlanta Magazine's 2025 Best Specialty Food Shop. While Alon's is known for much more than cookies — they also sell artisan breads, cheeses, sandwiches, coffee, croissants, danishes, macarons, cakes, and more — I always head straight for the cookies. After more than a decade of indulging my way through Atlanta's cookies, I'd consider Alon's as the first one I fell in love with and among the city's very best.

I do not adhere to a gluten-free diet, so I'll admit that I wasn't expecting one of my favorite cookies in Atlanta to come from a gluten-free bakery. But Hell Yeah! Gluten Free Bakery proved me wrong. I first heard about the bakery from a coworker who knew how much I love sweets; after work, I hopped straight in my car and drove over to see what the hype was about. I was, admittedly, pleasantly surprised by how good all their desserts were — from donuts and pies to Pop-Tart equivalents and, of course, their chocolate chip cookie. It's made with Valrhona chocolate and has a smoother texture than the cookies I'm used to. It's hard to describe — almost somewhere between a Perfect Bar and a classic chocolate chip cookie.

The bakery was founded by former software engineer Alejandra Luaces, who taught herself to bake after developing a gluten intolerance and was later named a StarChefs Rising Star Baker in 2023; since then, however, she has sold off the business. Hell Yeah! Gluten Free has two intown locations — its primary on DeKalb Avenue on Atlanta's eastside, as well as a new pop-up in the historic Atlanta Daily World building on Auburn Avenue — and the bakery lives by the philosophy that "gluten-free doesn't have to suck."  All I can say is: hell yeah, indeed.