Girl Scouts rollin’ in dough: It’s a big year for cookie sales

Perhaps it’s a backlash against low-carb diets, or the sheer pluck of the young salespeople, or the fact that this will be the last year that Thanks-A-Lot cookies will be sold, but the Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania is reporting a banner year for Girl Scout cookie sales.

This year’s local drive ends this weekend as Wawa allows troops to set up tables outside stores to sell the nine kinds of cookies, which fetch $4 a box ($5 for the gluten-free caramel chocolate chip).

As of Monday, March 2, with nearly a week to go, local cookie sales were at 105% of last year’s total, according to Vicki Lupica, a spokesperson for the council. That translates to an additional 25,000 cases, or 300,000 packages of cookies. The council did not provide more specifics, but said ABC Bakers received another cookie order as supplies began to dwindle.

Lupica said sales, as of early this week, were at 104% over all of 2017, the council’s best year. Twenty-five-hundred more packages were sold online as of this week than the 2017 online total.

Last year, the council reported $16 million in sales of about 4 million boxes, or an average of 192 boxes sold per girl. The money raised stays local.

Thin Mints are the top seller, followed by Caramel deLites (labeled as Samoas in the councils whose cookies are baked by Little Brownie Bakers) and Peanut Butter Patties (also known as Tagalongs).

Thanks-A-Lots, which are shortbread cookies with fudge on the bottom, will be replaced next year by a yet-to-be-named flavor. This year’s new cookie, Lemonades (also known as Lemon-Ups), has proved popular.

Sales in South Jersey were doing well, said Kimberly Bryson, chief operating officer of the Central & Southern NJ council.

One scout had a stroke of beginner’s luck. Madelyn “Maddy” Nikitiades, a first-year Daisy from Troop 71316 in Cranbury, N.J., got a donation of 1,000 cookie-share boxes from family friends Paige and Ed McLaughlin as part of the council’s Dare to Cookie Share Challenge. The cookies will be sent to men and women at Fort Dix and the Coast Guard Academy, Bryson said.

The Girl Scouts cookie program is designed to instill qualities such as teamwork, planning, and positivity.