Please use the codetags and indention.

If you just want to figure who ate most, you can loop through your array and hold the index of the person who ate most, for every new person you check against that index if she ate more or less, if she ate more, save that index instead, if not continue.

Your struct looks very c like, try:

struct PancakeEater
{
  std::string name;
  int count;
};

std::vector<PancakeEater> people;  //or std::array

u sir are my new best friend, thank you

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <vector>
#include <sstream>

using std::cout;
using std::cin;
using std::endl;
using std::vector;
using std::string;

struct Person
{
	string name;
	unsigned int pancakesAte;
};

int main()
{
	const int NUM_PEOPLE = 10;   // its always nice to store values that may appear more than once in variables - you can change this to any number of people now
	int holdConsoleOpen;  // just a dummy variable to hold the console open at the end of the program by using cin >> holdConsoleOpen
	vector<Person> people; // create a vector of the type Person. A vector is very similiar to an array only it allows you to do a lot of things in easier ways


	// user input and instruction screen (as you had it)
	cout << "--------------------------------PANCAKE-O-MATIC--------------------------------\n\n";
	cout << "-----------please enter the number of pancakes eaten by each person------------\n\n";

	unsigned int mostPancakesIndex = 0;  // keep track of the index to the vector<Person> which will refer to the person who ate the most pancakes
	for(int index = 0; index < NUM_PEOPLE; index++)  // notice NUM_PEOPLE instead of 10.. if you change NUM_PEOPLE now it will change here
	{
		std::stringstream ss;  // This is a string stream. It works the same way cout does but it allows you to get a string version of it at any time
		Person person;         // Create a person of the struct type Person (will have name and pancakesAte attributes)

		ss << "Person " << index;  // Use the string stream to create a name for the person - will be "Person [current index + 1]"
								   // ie if index = 0 then the persons name will be "Person 1"
		person.name = ss.str();    // now use the str() function of the string stream to assign the string value to person.name

		cout << "how many did person " << person.name << " eat? "; // now we can use person.name
		cin >> person.pancakesAte;  // and assign the input to person.pancakesAte

		people.push_back(person);  // add this person to the back of the vector

		if ( person.pancakesAte > people[mostPancakesIndex].pancakesAte ) // If the current person ate more pancakes than the person associated with the saved index - overwrite the saved 
			mostPancakesIndex = index;									  // index with the current person's index
	}

	std::vector<Person>::iterator iter = people.begin(); // Use a vector<Person>::iterator to go through the contents of the people vector
	while (iter != people.end()) // people.end() is a special value that tells us that there are no more items in the vector to go through
	{
		cout << iter->name << " ate " << iter->pancakesAte << " pancakes." << endl; // Say how many pancakes the person ate
		++iter; // increment the iterator
	}
	cout << people[mostPancakesIndex].name << " ate the most pancakes - he/she ate " << people[mostPancakesIndex].pancakesAte << " pancakes." << endl; // use the saved index to get the person that ate the most pancakes

	cin >> holdConsoleOpen;
}

This is code that will do what you want with comments explaining everything..

Woops someone already replied while i was writing this reply - their code works fine too!!!

cheers for the input fellas i really appreciate all the help as well as the different ways i can approach the same problem, thanks for your time and input

why did someone down vote both of my replies? they were at 1 each - did I do something wrong?