Did you know that Girl Scouts have a fall product sale? Cookies are generally sold around the country in the spring months. In the fall, however, girls hit the streets to sell things like calendars, Hot Cajun Crunch, Honey Roasted Peanuts, Peanut Squares, Chocolate Covered Almonds and Mint Melt-Aways, which are nothing like Thin Mints, so don't get your hopes up. Some of the items are usually packaged in holiday tins so that you can purchase items for gifts (delivery is before the holiday season begins, for that purpose.
Like the cookies, different areas of the country are supplied by different companies (Trophy Nut and Dayton Nuts are two suppliers used around the country; see the links). If Hot Cajun Crunch isn't on an order form in your area, then you're likely to see things like Deluxe Pecan Clusters, Peanut Butter Dreams, Island Fruit Mix, Peanut Brittle, Mint Trefoils (also not like Thin Mints), Honey Roasted Peanuts, Peanut Squares, Trail Mix, Mixed Nuts, Gummi Bears, Chocolate-Covered Raisins, Chocolate-Covered Almonds, and Chocolate-Covered Pretzels. Some councils also offer QSP magazine subscriptions.
Unlike the cookie sale where there is a flat-rate for each box, the items in the fall product sale vary in price from $3 to $10. Like cookie sales, the nut/calendar/melt away sales teach the girls responsibility, goal setting, and people skills. Girls also receive incentive awards including things like participation patches, t-shirts, stuffed animals, and books.
Money earned through this sale is used by the troops to fund troop activities and by your local Girl Scout Council to fund large-scale activities and projects such as facility maintenance, equipment purchase and maintenance, financial scholarships for needy girls who want to be in Girl Scouts but can't afford dues, event fees, and/or uniform and insignia costs.
I know, I know. Girl Scout Nuts, doesn't have the same ring as Girl Scout Cookies. When that little Brownie knocks on your door, however, give her a break; it's not her fault the cookies aren't available until the spring!
Cookie sales are THE Girl Scout tradition. It's a major event that requires enormous volunteer efforts to pull off each year. At the troop level, it also requires a great deal of time and effort. An adult must attend training and coordinate all aspects of ordering and delivering for what can be hundreds of cases of cookies. Traditional troops (those with just two or three co-leaders) tend to tackle the challenge by recruiting a cookie manager/mom.
In practice, most cookie managers are moms, but grandparent and dads often serve as well.
In my troops, which are cooperative, one or two moms take on that role and do not do any other events throughout the year. Even at that, I am not sure it is a fair swap. Our cookie moms attend training and then teach or re-teach the girls cookie sale etiquette in December. In the process, it's often a good idea to focus on one of the cookie try its or badges, since they tend to focus on the exact things that need to be covered or reviewed. They also collect permission slips to sell at this point (very important to ensure financial liability is assumed by each girl's parent).
The girls sell with the help of their parents and then the cookie moms have to count and order for the troop. Their next job as cookie gurus is to pick up the troop's order and then divide it up so that each girl can collect her share. Collecting and depositing the money may seem to ensure that the cookie moms have done enough, but somewhere in the middle of delivery, the cookie moms also coordinate up to four cookie booths.
Cookie booths are when the girls, properly chaperoned, set up a table and sell cookies to the general public. The best places to do this tend to be outside grocery stores and movie rental spots. Our troop does just one cookie booth a year, and the girls seem to enjoy it a great deal. Our neighborhood cookie manager originally provided us with the right combination of cases to order to stock our cookie booth but over the years, we've come up with out own list of big sellers and order accordingly.
Not enough? Cookie moms also have to order, pick up, and distribute incentives (patches and prizes) after all the monies are turned into Council. Incentives are the easiest and most enjoyable part of the job, although it can be hard to look at the faces of those who did not sell enough to earn the treasured incentive.
Being cookie mom, in other words, is a big commitment that requires good organizational skills. It is an essential job though. Without a cookie mom, a troop cannot participate in the cookie sale.
Girl Scout Cookies, one of the group's biggest fundraisers, began in 1936. It only took 2 years before the group had sold a million cookies. Cookies were originally baked and "packaged" in the kitchens of the girls.
The official Girl Scout website offers this "early Girl Scout Cookie Recipe."
(recipe taken from: http://www.girlscouts.org/program/gs_cookies/cookie_history/early_years.asp)
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AN EARLY GIRL SCOUT COOKIE® RECIPE
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar plus additional amount for topping (optional)
2 eggs
2 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
Cream butter and the cup of sugar; add well-beaten eggs, then milk, vanilla, flour, salt, and baking powder. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour. Roll dough, cut into trefoil shapes, and sprinkle sugar on top, if desired. Bake in a quick oven (375°) for approximately 8 to 10 minutes or until the edges begin to brown. Makes six- to seven-dozen cookies.
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Two baking companies currently produce the cookies - ABC/Interbake Foods and Little Brownie Bakers. There are always Thin Mints, Do-si-dos (the peanut butter cookie formerly known as the Savannah) and Trefoils (the "original" Girl Scout cookie). Thin mints are the most popular, taking at least 40% of the sales. The other cookie types vary, depending on what is of interest at the time. Thin Mints are the third-most popular cookie in America.
Current prices range between $4.00 and $6.00 a box. All profits from cookie sales go directly to the council in which the cookies were sold. A portion go directly to the troop that was responsible for that sale.
In addition to serving as a fundraiser, Girl Scout cookie sales teach young girls about responsibility, pride, setting and meeting goals, money-management, and communication.
If you don't want the calories but still want to help out that little girl at your door, ask her about donating some cookies; if you buy and donate, your purchase becomes tax-deductible.
On the other hand, if you can't resist eating them yourselves but are watching your waist, the Trefoils generally have the lowest calorie count per cookie. The chocolate-covered shortbread varieties have the highest. The chocolate peanut-butter patties, big surprise, have the highest fat content, and the lemon cookies have the lowest. Who are we kidding though? Just order the Thin Mints like everyone else!
Cookie booths are the fast and safe way to sell cookies in a time when many parents no longer feel comfortable sending their kids door to door.
When I was a kid, there was one way to sell cookies and that was to take my cookie sheet and go door to door, knocking on them all and asking whomever opened the door if they wanted to buy some Girl Scout cookies. I knew many of the occupants of the homes I visited. Customers often would buy a few boxes, saving some of their choices for the next Girl Scout to knock on their door. When I got older, a fellow Scout and I, frustrated with the low yield of these door-to-door sales, decided to maximize our sales in the minimum of square footage by hitting the local college dorm.
I lived in a small town in the middle of America, so I did this without so much as a chaperone. It wasn't until I hit the college dorm that I even went out to sell with a buddy. In fact, selling with a buddy was something I avoided at all costs, since having a buddy by my side or even on the same street would only reduce my sales!
My sales were pretty good with these methods. I seem to recall selling enough to earn the incentives of my choice, but for every ten boxes I sold as a kid, I may have had to approach 5-10 customer houses. These days, my two Girl Scouts can get a 20-box sale from one customer. Honestly, as the parent helping to deliver hundreds of boxes, I am relieved when a case or more goes to one address. Going back and forth to the same house six or seven times to deliver one box rapidly becomes tiresome because I no longer live in the middle of America and we no longer live in an age when our Girl Scouts can canvas the local neighborhood in search of sales without a parent or other adult chaperone in tow.
Many parents take the Girl Scout order forms to work, which is understandable since working parents have even less time than I do to go back and forth to homes to deliver with their Scouts. The problem that I have always had with this form of parental help is that it undermines one of the benefits of cookie sales, namely that the GIRL learns sales techniques and the GIRL earns money for her Scouting activities.
And, ok, as a child who did not have a parent in an office setting, I admit it... I always felt like those who sent their sheets to work with parents were somehow cheating. Fast forward to the present and I am relieved that office sales provide an avenue for selling that does not send my girls into the world to strange houses. However, despite my repeated offers, I could not convince my husband to wear a Brownie beanie as he peddled Girl Scout cookies at work.
To return to my main point, and the topic of this article, there is an option that does not require parents to don beanies and knee socks, that allows me to chaperone my girls as THEY sell, and that allows the girls to do the selling. That option is cookie boothing.
Cookie booths were not something we did in my town when I was a kid, but they are easily my favorite method of sales now. Where we live, we have a cookie booth goddess who coordinates booth dates and times throughout our metro area. General targets are grocery and video stores on weekends, particularly Friday and Saturday nights.
Once assigned a spot, we take some pre-ordered cookies and a card table and proceed to sell as many as 500 boxes of cookies in an evening. In finding some links for this article, I stumbled across a statistic that 85% of people will buy Girl Scout cookies if approached. That statistic goes a long way in explaining why we do so well with a card table of cookies set up outside a local grocery store and a small group of cherubic Brownies asking people to buy their Thin Mints!
The parents watch, encourage, and provide hints, but the girls do the selling, and the best part is that they wear the beanies (ok, I lie, few girls will wear beanies without a good solid bribe, but at least they do wear their vests!) Thus from my perspective cookie booths meet all the goals of cookie selling: the girls learn sales techniques, practice social and selling skills, and make the actual sales themselves.
Girl Scout cookie offerings change every year and one of the most persistent questions I get is about what kinds of cookies were offered and when. This is going to be an ongoing article that I will update whenever I find new info on cookies through the years.
1930-1950
Commercial bakers were licensed to bake Girl Scout cookies beginning in 1936 and by 1948, 29 bakers were baking for the organization. By 1961, that number had dropped to 16 bakers and to four by 1978. Today, two bakers, ABC and Little Brownie Bakers, bake for the Girl Scouts. ABC has been baking Girl Scout cookies since 1939.
1951
Sandwich
Shortbread (ancestor to the Trefoil)
Chocolate Mint (ancestor to the Thin Mint)
1956
Shortbread
Chocolate Mint
Vanilla Sandwich
Chocolate Sandwich
1966
Shortbread
Chocolate Mint
Peanut Butter Patties
1974-1976 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Van'chos
Thin Mints
Samoas (chocolate, caramel, and coconut-covered cookie)
*Trefoils (shortbread)
*Do Si Dos (peanut butter patties)
1976-1977 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Van'chos
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
*Tagalongs (chocolate-covered peanut butter patties)
1977-1978 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Van'chos
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Granola
1978-1979 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Van'chos
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
1979-1981 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Van'chos
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Forget-Me-Nots
1981-1983 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Van'chos
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Chocolate Chunk
1983-1984 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Medallions
*Chocolate Chunk
1984-1985 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Juliettes
Chocolate Chunk
1985-1987 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Pecan Shortee
Chocolate Chunk
1987-1988 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Echo
Chocolate Chunk
1988-1990 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
Echo
*Country Hearth Chocolate Chip
1990-1991 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Chalet Cremes (vanilla and chocolate sandwich cookies)
*Trail Mix
1991-1993 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
Chalet Cremes
*Golden Nut Clusters
1993-1995 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
Chalet Cremes
Juliettes
*Snaps (iced oatmeal-raisin cookies)
1995-1996 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Reduced-Fat Chalet Cremes
Juliettes
Snaps
1996-1997 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Sugar Free Chalet Cremes
*Striped Chocolate Chip
Snaps
1997-2000 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Apple Cinnamon (apple-shaped sugar cookies, topped with cinnamon sugar)
Striped Chocolate Chip
Lemon Drops
2000-2001 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
Apple Cinnamon
*Aloha Chips (Macadamia, white chocolate chip)
Lemon Drops
2001-2003 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Ole Ole (powdered sugar-covered cookies with vanilla, pecans, and coconut)
Aloha Chips
All Abouts (chocolate-covered shortbread)
2003-2005 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Double Dutch (chocolate chocolate-chip cookies)
All Abouts
*Lemon Coolers (tangy lemon cookies covered in powdered sugar)
2004-2005 ABC Bakers Thin Mints
Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies (same as Do Si Dos)
Shortbread (same as Trefoils)
Carmel Delites (same as Samoas: vanilla cookies drenched in caramel and sprinkled with coconut)
Iced Berry Pinatas (fruit-filled oatmeal cookie)
Peanut Butter Patties (same as Tagalongs: chocolate covered patties)
Lemon Pastry Creams (reduced-fat lemon-creme cookie)
Amimal Treasures (same as All Abouts: chocolate-dipped shortbread)
2005-2006 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Cafe Cookies (crispy cinnamon cookie caramelized with brown sugar)
All Abouts
Lemon Coolers
2006-2007 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
Cafe Cookies
All Abouts
*Sugar Free Browines (hard little brownie bites)
2007-2008 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
All Abouts
*Lemon Chalet (lemon sandwich)
Sugar Free Chocolate Chip
2008-2009 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
*Dulce de Leche (Caramel cookie)
Lemon Chalet
Sugar Free Chocolate Chip
*Cinna-Spins (crispy cinnamon snack swirls)
2008-2009 (ABC Bakers)
Thin Mints
Caramel Delites
Shortbread (same as Trefoils)
Peanut Butter Sandwich
Peanut Butter Patties
Lemonades (same as Lemon Chalet))
Thanks a Lot (Same as All Abouts/Animal Treasures)
Reduced Fat Daisy Go Rounds (crispy cinnamon cookies)
2010-2012 (Little Brownie Bakers)
Thin Mints
Samoas
Trefoils
Do Si Dos
Tagalongs
Savannah Smiles (Same as Lemon Coolers)
*Dulce de Leche (Caramel cookie)
Thank You Berry Munch
2010-2012 (ABC Baker)
Thin Mints
Caramel Delites
Shortbread (same as Trefoils)
Peanut Butter Sandwich
Peanut Butter Patties
Lemonades (same as Lemon Chalet))
Thanks a Lot (Same as All Abouts/Animal Treasures)
Shout Outs (Belgian style carmelized cookies)
2017 saw the introduction of two different kinds of S'mores cookies. The Little Brownie Baker S'more is a sandwich cookie with chocolate and marshmallow-inspired filling. The ABC version is more like a Fudge Graham.
Other known varieties of Girl Scout cookies include the following:
Cabana Cremes (vanilla and chocolate sandwich cookies)
Cartwheels (a reduced fat cinnamon-oatmeal cookie)
1980s: Golden Yangles (cheese crackers)
