Best Pie Charlotte Eats Sweets: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best Pie contest is and who runs it

The Best Pie contest is an open reader award that AY Magazine runs on aymag.com for its Arkansas readership. The program belongs to the magazine's best-of coverage, the same family of reader's-choice balloting that fills the publication's calendar each year. Its subject is specific and local: the pie at Charlotte's Eats & Sweets, a bakery in the small town of Keo, southeast of Little Rock, which the magazine's own feature calls one of the South's great hidden secrets.

The feature that anchors the category is titled "The Best Pie Ever? Heather Baker and DJ Williams Check Out Charlotte's Eats & Sweets." Heather Baker and DJ Williams are the magazine personalities the piece follows on the visit, and their trip to Keo is what put the shop's pie up for reader votes. That gives this program an unusual shape among best-of contests: rather than a broad roster of businesses across many categories, the headline ballot is built around a single celebrated bakery and the readers who want to back it.

Because the vote is carried on the magazine's own website, everything a supporter needs lives at one address, the Best Pie page on aymag.com. No outside balloting service sits between the reader and the vote. The program's fixed details are collected below.

The dated facts: editions and the yearly window

Four editions of the pie ballot are confirmed: 2020, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Those years mark the program as annual, with the 2020 edition standing apart from a recent unbroken run across 2024, 2025 and 2026. The magazine's own copyright line runs to 2026, which matches the most recent confirmed edition, and the ballot page itself is the live source for the current cycle.

The window falls between March and May each cycle, and it opens in a nomination round. That ordering matters for anyone supporting the Keo bakery: the first dated step in a cycle is getting an entry nominated, and only after that does the open vote on aymag.com decide the result. A supporter who arrives in April may already be looking at a ballot that nominations shaped weeks earlier.

What the magazine has not printed ahead of time is the fine print of the cycle: the exact day the window opens, the day it closes, whether one supporter may vote more than once, and the eligibility terms for the Charlotte's Eats & Sweets category; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That is not unusual for a magazine-run best-of program, but it does mean every plan built around this ballot should start by reading the current page rather than last year's dates.

One more boundary is worth stating plainly. The confirmed edition list stops at 2026. A year after the most recent edition cannot be counted as one that has already run, so any claim about a future cycle is speculation until the magazine publishes it.

How a supporter votes in the Keo pie contest today

Voting happens directly on aymag.com. A supporter opens the Best Pie page, the same address that carried the 2020, 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions, and backs the Charlotte's Eats & Sweets entry. No outside balloting service sits in the middle, so the magazine's own page is both the ballot and the rulebook.

Because the cycle opens in a nomination round between March and May, a first-time supporter should check which phase is live before acting. If nominations are open, the useful act is submitting or confirming the pie's entry. If voting is open, the useful act is the vote itself. The current page states which phase is running; the magazine has not printed a separate schedule of round dates ahead of time.

Two practical points follow from the host. First, everything about the vote, including any login step, any limit on repeat voting and any anti-abuse term, is printed by AY Magazine on its own page, so the current ballot is the only place the terms can be read. Second, a vote cast anywhere other than the magazine's own page does not count toward the Keo bakery's total, which makes the official address the single destination that matters for supporters.

Supporters who want the shop to win should also treat the magazine's feature itself as part of the campaign. Sharing "The Best Pie Ever?" piece puts the ballot in front of readers who have never heard of the Keo bakery, and reader reach of that kind is what an open vote converts into a result.

How this ballot sits beside Arkansas's other best-of programs

Arkansas has an active best-of balloting scene, and the pie contest is one of several programs the state's publications run. Nearby pages cover Best of the Grand Prairie from the Stuttgart Daily Leader, Arkansas Business Best of Biz, CommunityVotes Jonesboro, Arkansas Money & Politics Best of AMP, Best of the Best from the Russellville Courier, and the Arkansas Times Best of Arkansas. Each of those programs has its own publisher and its own calendar, so nothing printed for one of them transfers to the aymag.com pie ballot.

What separates this program from those neighbours is its focus. The Stuttgart, Jonesboro, Russellville and Arkansas Times ballots are broad reader's-choice contests across many businesses and categories, while the AY Magazine pie ballot is anchored to a single celebrated shop in Keo and the feature that made it famous. The Arkansas Business and AMP programs lean toward the business and politics reader; this one leans toward food and travel, which is why the magazine framed it as a discovery story rather than a ranking exercise.

The host also differs. Several Arkansas best-of programs run on dedicated balloting platforms, but this vote lives on the magazine's own website, which keeps the rules, the phases and the results under one editorial roof. For readers comparing the state's ballots, that makes the pie contest the simplest of the set: one publisher, one page, one bakery, and a window each year between March and May.

Strengthening support for Charlotte's Eats & Sweets on this ballot

Support that works on this ballot starts with the nomination round between March and May, because an entry that misses nomination never reaches the vote. A supporter backing the Keo bakery should confirm early in the cycle that the pie is on the aymag.com ballot, then build outreach around the magazine's own feature, since that story is what introduced most Arkansas readers to the shop.

On outside help, the organizer's stated position is whatever it prints on the current page, and no separate rules text has been published ahead of time. That makes the magazine's own page the only safe reference before any push. Tactics that depend on real readers, such as asking customers in the shop, posting the feature link, and reminding people once the vote is open, sit comfortably inside a reader's-choice format. Anything automated sits outside what a magazine-run ballot is designed to measure, and the organizer enforces its own terms on its own page.

For a fuller picture of what strengthens an open-vote entry without guessing at rules, read the guide on getting more votes online, then check the current aymag.com page for this cycle's terms before acting.