Member-only story
Who Makes Girl Scout Cookies?
Plus a brief history of these amazing snacks
It is that time of year again — Girl Scout Cookie Season. The time when people gleefully buy calories in bulk from adorable families around supermarkets and from friends. There are very few people who don’t enjoy a good Girl Scout Cookie. In fact, if you ask anyone what their favorite cookie is you are likely to get an emphatic and immediate answer. While almost everyone can spot a Girl Scout Cookie stand from two suburban blocks away, very few people know who actually makes these cookies.
So who actually makes Girl Scout Cookies, and why aren’t they more famous? The truth is not quite what you might think at first. The Girl Scouts do not make their own cookies, but they contract out national bakers to create them in bulk. This system is similar to how factories work, and these questions can give us an insight into how tasty baked goods are created in bulk.
A Brief History of Girl Scout Cookies
Girl Scout Cookies were once homemade. Each troop was tasked with baking a certain number of cookies for sale in a traditional bake sale environment. Girl Scout Cookies are and always have been the primary fundraising force for the Girl Scouts, even when they were homemade. That practice ended in 1930 when the Girl Scouts decided…