How Much Money Do Girl Scouts Get From Cookie Sales

It is January, which means Girl Sentinel cookie flavor 2019 has officially begun, an annual tradition in which brigades of girls in globe-toned uniforms hawk boxes of cookies to family, friends, and strangers. But unlike nearly fundraising efforts — National Public Radio, for example, or elementary schoolhouse wrapping paper sales — Girl Scout Cookies are honey. They are dear similar apple pie is beloved, or puppies.

Daughter Scout cookies are a triumph: of marketing, of cookie-baking, of youthful entrepreneurship. Between Jan and Apr every year, the more than one million scouts in the U.S. sell nigh 200 meg boxes of the cookies, Fortune recently reported. How much is that, in cookie terms? Girl Scout cookie sales top Oreos. They top Chips Ahoy and Milano combined. For general comparing'southward sake, the entire population of America is only 325.7 one thousand thousand. Are we that excited about young women selling things? Are Trefoils that good? What is going on?

To unpack this mystery, permit's brainstorm with the very basic facts.

The bones facts of Girl Scout cookies

Girl Scouts is an organization for girls ages v through 18, who are organized past historic period group and visually recognizable by color-coded uniforms. According to official Girl Scout materials, the organization combines "life skills, STEM, the outdoors, and entrepreneurship with civic engagement to evangelize crucial, life-changing, girl-led programming." At current count, the program has ane.vii million members.
Girl Scouts sell cookies. Each Girl Sentry quango conducts a single cookie sale each year, which by and large lasts for half-dozen to eight weeks. Usually, these sales accept place sometime betwixt January and Apr — cookie season 2019 officially kicked off on January 2 — but information technology's up to the individual council. Some rebellious troops sell them in the fall. No private scout is required to sell cookies.
This year, there are 12 essential types of Daughter Sentinel cookies on offer, according to the Girl Scouts' "Meet the Cookies" page. Yet, non all cookies are available in all locations. This is very lamentable, but also beautiful in a way, similar how flowers are beautiful because they die.

Toward a history of Daughter Watch Cookies, bootleg sugar cookies to S'mores

The recorded history of Girl Scout cookies dates dorsum to 1917 — five years later on the organization was founded — when a troop of Daughter Scouts in Muskogee, Oklahoma, held a cookie sale in their loftier school deli as a way to fund troop activities. Merely the original cookies were home-broiled, simply regular cookie-cookies. Word spread; a troop in Connecticut started selling, and then a troop in Massachusetts.

In July 1922, the American Daughter magazine published a recipe for basic saccharide cookies, intended for troop sales. Information technology's a pretty simple recipe: butter, sugar, flour, eggs. Ingredients cost between 26 and 36 cents and would yield six or 7 dozen cookies, which, the publication suggested, could be sold door to door for 25 to xxx cents per dozen.

Every bit Atlas Obscura points out, the simplicity was of import since the scouts were baking the cookies themselves. But even dorsum in the bootstrapping olden days, older and savvier relatives may take been involved. "Grandma used to bake the cookies," a then-83-twelvemonth-old erstwhile Girl Scout told Time. "I was never the kitchen cooker, I stayed outside."

The era of home blistering didn't last long: In 1934, the Girl Scouts of Greater Philadelphia Council sold the kickoff commercially baked version. Two years later, the national Daughter Sentinel organization switched to commercial bakers, and that was the stop of the Girl Scout baking era. In 1939 — a historic year for cookies — the Girl Scouts introduced the "first-ever iteration of the Thin Mint, so called 'Cooky-Mints,'" Time says, noting that in the years that followed, the trim mint-chocolate cookies went by a whole roster of minty names, including Chocolate Mint, Sparse Mint, Cookie Mint, and and then Chocolate Mint (again), Thin Mints, Thin Mint (singular!), and then back to Thin Mints once more.

(At that place was a brief cookie hiatus during World War Two, when flour, sugar, and butter shortages led the Daughter Scouts to pivot abroad from cookies and toward calendars, simply one of the less heralded perks of the war'south end was that they were able to render to cookies.)

By 1951, the basic cookie lineup had been finalized, reports Smithsonian: a sandwich cookie, a shortbread cookie, and a Thin Mint/Thin Mints/Chocolate Mint diversity, which is nonetheless the No. 1 best-seller, probably because it is the best.

At i signal in the late '40s, at that place were 29 different bakeries making Girl Picket cookies. But by the '60s, the Girl Scouts trimmed their squad of licensed bakers to fourteen, for the sake of cookie continuity. By the belatedly '70s, they were down to four, and past the 1990s, the Girl Scouts had winnowed the field again, to ii.

Daughter Scouts selling cookies at a cookie stand.

Not all cookies have been lasting hits. Shortbread (also known as Trefoils) and Thin Mints are indelible classics. Other cookies have been lost to time. Kookaburras — the "lovechild of a Rice Krispies treat and a Twix bar," recalls a wistful Mental Floss article — came and went in the '80s. Golden Yangles, an experimental cheese cracker, was excised from the lineup in 1992.

"The decision about cookie varieties for each Daughter Sentry Cookie season is a response to consumer trends and feedback, as well as sales," Stewart Goodbody, director of communications Girl Scouts of the USA, told the Washington Mail. The reduced-fatty Apple tree Cinnamons and Olé Olés of the ultra-low-fatty '90s are a relic of their era; now we take Toffee-tastics and, this year, Caramel Chocolate Chip Cookies, both of which are gluten-free.

Which cookies you lot get — and what those cookies gustatory modality like — depends on where y'all live

Today, Girl Scout cookies are produced past two bakeries: ABC Bakers and Little Credibility Bakers. This is why near-identical cookies take different names — why some people know chocolate-striped kokosnoot-caramel rings as "Samoas" (a product of Little Brownie Bakers) and others know them as "Caramel deLites" (a production of ABC Bakers).

ABC Bakers' version of the S'mores cookie.

In Detroit, you get Tagalongs, Footling Brownie's entry into the peanut butter/chocolate cookie catechism. Simply in Chicago, yous go Peanut Butter Patties, by ABC Bakers, instead. Are the cookies the same? In spirit, yep. In reality, in that location are slight variations in the recipes, apparent on the nutritional panel, and also by looking at it. Fifty-fifty cookies that become by the aforementioned name nationwide — a Thin Mint is always a Sparse Mint — taste different depending on who makes them.

The Los Angeles Times, which has meticulously tracked the geographic differences between cookies, explains that an ABC Bakers Thin Mint is "crunchier, with more mint than chocolate in each seize with teeth," while the Little Credibility Bakers cookie — still a Sparse Mint! — has a "richer smoother chocolate blanket" with a "distinct peppermint taste." Or consider the S'mores cookie, a 2017 add-on to the Girl Scout cookie canon, which is, in fact, two singled-out cookies that share i name.

According to the New York Times, the GSUSA presented the thought for the Southward'more than to both bakeries, which created their ain cookie-fied versions of the bivouac archetype. (Equally the Girl Scouts' FAQ cookie page says, "In that location'south no incorrect fashion to eat s'mores!") The ABC S'more, per the LA Times analysis, is a chocolate-covered square with a "faint vanilla/marshmallow layer" and a larger graham cracker portion. The Little Brownie variation, however, is a blond-looking sandwich cookie filled with a layer of chocolate and another of "marshmallowlike icing," printed with the clarifying words "Girl Scout S'mores."

Petty Brownie Bakers' version of the S'mores cookie.

Some cookies, meanwhile, are only available through ane baker or the other. There is no exact Piffling Credibility equivalent of ABC's Thank you-a-Lots, shortbread rounds with fudge bottoms, and no precise ABC interpretation of Little Brownie'southward gluten-free Toffee-tastic cookies, although this year, ABC launched another gluten-free offering, a caramel chocolate chip melange. Each baker, a Daughter Lookout spokesperson told the Washington Post, tin can offer up to eight varieties; as new cookies come, old cookies go.

ABC Bakers is based in Richmond, Virginia; Trivial Credibility Bakers in Louisville, Kentucky. And so 1 might imagine that this would somehow inform which cookies are sold where. But this would be a error. Equally the LA Times map shows, the two bakeries' cookies show up all over the state: Parts of Kentucky, home of Little Brownie, use ABC, and the littoral tip of Virginia, which is generally ABC turf, uses Little Brownie. That'southward because it's upwards to the troops themselves which bakery to employ: Each regional quango — in that location are 112, nationwide — chooses which baker to contract with, and by extension, which version of Thin Mints you go.

Girl Scout cookies are an $800 million business concern

How big is the cookie business? Fortune spells it out: during prime cookie season, the nation'due south Girl Scouts — more than than one million of them — do about $800 million in total cookie sales.

For the rest of the cookie market place, Girl Scout cookie season is an inevitable fact of life. "The almanac Girl Scout cookie sale is a force of nature at the national level," John Frank, a Mintel food analyst, told USA Today. "Big companies like Kraft know it's coming, and they've learned to live with information technology. It'south like a storm and in that location'south naught they can do simply expect for it to pass, because there is no upside to marketing against the Girl Scouts."

The staggering sales, every bit the Daughter Spotter materials are fond of pointing out, make the cookie program the "largest financial investment in girls annually in the United States."

Because each regional council sets its ain prices, the cost of a box of cookies depends on the realities of your local market. In 2017, the price jumped overall, with many areas seeing boxes go from $iii.50 or $4 to a absurd $5. (This year's gluten-free Caramel Chocolate Fries may price a piffling bit more, to "showtime high product costs," the New York Post reports.)

Girl Scouts preparing to sell their stock.

"All of the net revenue from cookie sales — 100 percent of it — stays within a Girl Picket council'due south local expanse to benefit girls and their council," a Daughter Lookout man rep assured Bustle. The proceeds are split up between the council — which funds things similar summer camps and adult volunteer trainings, every bit well as coveted cookie-selling prizes — and the particular troop, where it goes toward activities and projects. A common model is "spend a lilliputian, save a lilliputian, share a footling," Goodbody told me. Making these decisions as a group is an of import role of the process.

How exactly the profits get divided is again up to the regional council, merely for a case report, let's turn to the Girl Scouts of Western Pennsylvania, who intermission downwardly their financials like this:

l percentage goes to council-sponsored programs, events, backdrop, preparation, and scholarships.
24 percent goes to the toll of the cookies.
23 percent goes to troop proceeds, girl recognitions, and service unit bonuses.
3 percent goes to the toll of Cookie Program support.

Managing inventory is of import. The logistics of ordering cookie stock — taking preorders versus buying cookies in advance to have ready on the spot — is a science and an fine art. There are door-to-door sales. There are booth sales, where troops set up cookie pop-ups at well-traversed locations. (Would you lot like to find a booth near you? The Girl Scouts have an app for that.) In that location are sales online.

Troops buy the stock they sell — if a girl has boxes to sell, she or her family bought those boxes — which means it is key to actually sell them. What to do with unsold cookies is a pop topic on parental message boards.

It's not just about the cookies

"I can say this until I'm blueish in the face," Goodbody tells me, "but it's well-nigh so much more than cookies." She points out that more than one-half of "female entrepreneurs and business owners are Girl Scout alums," according to data from the Daughter Scout Inquiry Institute. In the 2018 midterms, she notes, "the majority of females" elected to Congress were Daughter Scouts in one case.

"This is the start career motion for millions of girls," she says. For a v- or 6- or seven-year-old, it's a big bargain to experience in command of anything, given that, at 5 or six or 7, you aren't fifty-fifty in control of when you become to bed. "People are telling yous what to do all the fourth dimension and hither you are handling money and deciding where that money is going to get and figuring out how to market yourself and your production to customers."

The Girl Scouts' official materials credit cookie sales for instilling girls with five essential skills: goal-setting, decision-making, money management, people skills, and business organization ideals. "Don't take 'no' for an answer, push ahead and see the bigger picture," says Katelyn, a "cookie entrepreneur" quoted on the site.

"Selling cookies is usually a daughter'southward first exposure to the globe of concern," Frances Hesselbein, then the national executive director of the Girl Scouts, told the New York Times. "She learns how to come across the public, talk about a product, sell the product and is responsible for collecting money, giving change and delivering the product. That's quite a business venture for a 7-year-old.''

In the Washington Postal service, Kelly Richmond Pope, in one case a Daughter Scout, now a professor of forensic accounting, recalls "long weekends of walking door to door with my parents, working on my 'cookie elevator pitch' in between houses. I knew which houses were easy sells and which were tougher. I didn't realize at the time that I was learning marketing strategy in addition to sales." She goes on to credit selling cookies with teaching her "how to resist the temptation to embezzle" — a great lesson for united states of america all! — to set realistic goals, and to have responsibility for her work.

"I desire to be a neurosurgeon," Miranda, a xv-twelvemonth-old Girl Picket from Brooklyn, told Fortune between cookie transactions. "Every bit a girl scout, I am able to execute a plan, so when I'thousand a neurosurgeon and I desire to go into the brain, I have to execute a program."

Is at that place something perhaps vaguely sinister about celebrating the sixth-grader who put in "11-, 12-, 13-hr days" peddling cookies? With all due respect: yep. Would it exist nice to have a group organization for girls that did not lean quite and so heavily on building character by selling things on behalf of a major corporation? Also yep. At the same time, the cookie program is excellent preparation for the globe that actually exists. "When you know how to sell something, yous're kind of set for life," Goodbody says. Information technology is hard to contend.

Of course, all this hinges on one important particular: The girls accept to be the ones actually doing the selling. Except that if you are a person who works in an office with adults, y'all know this is non always how it goes.

"You lot already know exactly how this happens. You're sitting at your desk, or pushing your cart through the grocery shop, thinking well-nigh spring, when a sheepish parent sidles upwardly — and he's not fifty-fifty wearing a Girl Scout uniform. The adjacent thing y'all know, you've agreed to take commitment of three boxes of Trefoils," lamented KJ Dell'Antonia in the New York Times. "Information technology's a freaking noise," one Colorado mom told Thrillist. "I have to say, I kind of dread Girl Sentry Cookie flavor. It'southward a lot of work for me!"

The Girl Scouts, for their part, practise non condone this practice. "A girl," Goodbody says, "is ever supposed to initiate the sale." According to the system, delegating your parents to foist cookies on their colleagues does non institute "executing a program."

A Girl Lookout man selling her own cookies.

Fears nearly losing the plan'south educational edge led the Girl Scouts to question launching sales online. Only for the 2015 flavor, Girl Scouts of the United states of america launched the "Digital Cookie" platform, which allows online sales (educational activity "vital entrepreneurial lessons in online marketing, application employ, and e-commerce"). The twist is that you can just buy cookies through a girl'due south personal cookie website. And to access it, a potential customer needs a digital invitation from a participating Girl Spotter, which means y'all need a connexion to an actual Girl Sentinel, possibly considering you are related to her. (Girl Scouts are non supposed to laissez passer out their cookie URL to strangers, for condom reasons.)

There is one tiny loophole in the arrangement: Amazon. Just while y'all can technically buy them online, without interacting with a unmarried girl, the Girl Scouts of the Usa would strongly prefer you do not.

Girl Sentry cookies are a comforting tradition

Girl Picket cookies exercise have detractors. Besides exasperated parents, there are health advocates who object to the cookies, on the grounds that they're cookies. "Daughter Scout cookies are but some other sign of the problem of hyperconsumption," pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig told NPR. "This is just another part of this toxic food chain that kids are awash in," Susan Rubin, a dentist turned nutritionist and former troop leader, told the New York Times. "At some point, communities are going to have to walk abroad from the Do-Si-Dos."

Simply we haven't. People love Girl Lookout cookies. Part of that is the taste; they are eminently edible, because they are cookies. Part of that is the nostalgia. They remind you of childhood, how you once were a Girl Watch, or knew a Girl Scout, or ate cookies. They are elementary and pure.

"The Girl Watch cookie is a piece of Americana," Goodbody says. There is a motion picture in the Girl Lookout man athenaeum of Grace Coolidge eating Daughter Scout cookies on the White House lawn.

First lady Grace Coolidge eating a Daughter Picket cookie on the White House lawn.

They are also pleasantly limited. "Girl Lookout man cookies merely come around one time a twelvemonth," Harry Balzer, a national food proficient at the NPD Group inquiry house, told USA Today, "and they're very much similar Halloween is to candy and Thanksgiving is to turkey."

To Goodbody, a big role of the appeal is civic-minded: People want to support the girls themselves. "You desire to her to succeed, and you lot want to respond in a style that'south going to build her skills and so that she's confident and continues to have that risk and knock on the next door."

Girl Spotter cookies are not the best kind of cookies. But it doesn't affair, because they serve an important social part: They give usa all a high-minded excuse to do the thing nosotros all already desire to practise — buy and eat cookies.

Want more than stories from The Appurtenances by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here.

Source: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/24/18195824/girl-scout-cookies-explained-thin-mints-buy

Posted by: reillyweepre.blogspot.com