On a sunny Sunday afternoon, dozens of cookie lovers flocked to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They crowded into a small Crumbl storefront that looked like an Apple store but smelled of Funfetti. They placed their orders on white tablets and snapped photos of their millennial pink boxes of cookies.
Down the street at the original location of Levain Bakery, arguably New York’s most famous cookie purveyor, amazingly there was no sign of the line that is normally half a block long.
Connor Coleman, an artist who lives nearby, said he’s tried cookies at many bakeries in New York, but Crumbl is his favorite. “Unless I make them myself, this is the only cookie place I go,” he said.
He bought four cookies, including a Nutter Butter-flavored model. Like most of Crumbl’s offerings, it was plump, doughy, intensely sweet, and topped with a thick clod of frosting. Each cookie, baked on site, costs between $4 and $5 and can easily serve four people (you can even buy a cookie cutter). And every week comes a new offering of flavors, such as caramel popcorn, cotton candy, key lime pie and everything bagel.
Not everyone shares Mr. Coleman’s enthusiasm.
“They were so disappointing,” said Kiwanna Norwood, a career coach in Little Rock, Ark., who picked up a batch at a store there. “I just couldn’t get over the fact that they taste like cookie dough.”
So are the cookies good or not? When millions of people debate the question, the answer doesn’t really matter.
Crumbl is the fastest-growing chain of dessert shops in the United States and the fourth-fastest-growing food chain of any kind in the country, according to a 2022 report from Datassential, a food and beverage analytics company. In the past six years, Crumbl has opened more than 750 stores from coast to coast. The company says it sold an average of nearly a million cookies per day last year.
It’s the kind of success that can often be traced back to social media, but Crumbl is no ordinary internet sensation.
The company has fabricated its own hype and boosted it by announcing weekly cookie flavors on TikTok as if they were limited edition sneaker drops, with vaguely sensual slow-motion videos reminiscent of Burger King commercials. The company has amassed 6.7 million followers on the platform, more than Taco Bell and Starbucks combined.
“It actually put us on a different trajectory very, very quickly as a company,” says Jason McGowan, 43, who co-founded the company with his cousin Sawyer Hemsley, 30, in 2017 in Logan, Utah.
Breanna Brooks is just one of thousands of people who visit a Crumbl store every week, and she rates the varying flavors on her TikTok account.
But whenever she posts a review of Crumbl, “a lot of people get really mad,” says Ms. Brooks, who lives in Sacramento and works in marketing. They post laments that the cookies are terrible. “I just don’t understand,” she said. “It’s just cookies.”
Shentel Meadows, a social worker in Richmond, Virginia, is among those baffled by all the praise for the cookies. To her, they seem underbaked. “If you eat something raw and it gives you a stomach ache, it has an effect.”
She felt so disappointed that she complained on Twitter in February: “Just a daily reminder Crumbl cookies are no good,” she wrote.
Lauren Gillon, who runs Homegirl Kitchen, a pop-up bakery in Detroit, was tempted by TikTok to try Crumbl. But the cookies tasted artificial, she said. “I just don’t get the impression that they are homemade.”
Prior to starting Crumbl, Mr. McGowan and Mr. Hemsley had no baking training. But Mr. McGowan, who founded and sold a web company, thought those knowledge gaps could be filled through technology and user research.
“We thought, ‘How hard can this be?'” he said.
Instead of hiring a chef, the two searched for cookie recipes online, tested their way through dozens of versions, and asked people in supermarkets and parking lots for feedback. Mr. McGowan said he had invested several hundred thousand dollars to open the first store in Logan, Utah, and the company has still not sought investors.
The partners were convinced that TikTok – which was still new in the United States in 2017 – was the next big social media platform and worth focusing on.
After seeing a few reviews of Crumbl cookies on TikTok, the social media team started reposting them on the company’s TikTok account with the hashtag #TasteWeekly, even airing the videos in stores. “We doubled the content that is already being produced,” said Mr. McGowan.
When the company introduced the rotating flavor menu in 2018, there were suddenly new cookies for people to review every week — and a sense of scarcity. Customers piled on the hashtag #TasteWeekly whether they loved the cookies or hated them. The hashtag has been viewed 461.5 million times.
Crumbl has become a highly sought after tenant for developers, said Payton Kelly, senior advisor at SVN, a commercial real estate brokerage based in Santa Rosa, California. radius now reaches out to them.
Many customers said they rate Crumbl compared to Insomnia Cookies, a dessert chain known for its late-night cookie delivery. But Seth Berkowitz, the founder and CEO of Insomnia, doesn’t feel threatened by Crumbl’s success.
“A 1,000-calorie cookie,” he said. (Last week’s menu averaged 766 calories and 62.5 grams of sugar per cookie.) “It’s hard to imagine eating that every day. It is certainly a unique model.”
The founders of Crumbl, who just opened Crumbl’s first international branch in Edmonton, Alberta, have heard the criticism of their cookies. But the sales numbers don’t lie, Mr McGowan said. “We have the world’s best cookies.”
