Skip to footer

Girl Scouts stir up baking mixes for home cooks

A new line of baking mix available at grocery stores bears the Girl Scouts' trademark. Can it help the organization expand its brand and boost sagging revenue from cookie sales?

|
Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/File
Girl Scout Brogan Madden of Eastern Massachusetts Girl Scout Troop 71911, waits to take credit card payments on ROAMpay mobile card reader while selling cookies at the Harvard Square subway stop in January 2013 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • By David Iaconangelo Staff

Dear connoisseurs of Girl Scout cookies: Now you don't have to wait until March before indulging in your favorite Girl Scout cookie flavor.

In a partnership with the Girl Scouts, Pillsbury baking company is releasing a line of four baking mixes inspired by the Scouts' cookies. The line includes brownie, blondie, and cupcake mixes for Thin Mint and Caramel and Coconut flavors.

A box of the mix, will retail at $3.29. 

The partnership appears to be a way for the Girl Scouts to gin up some extra revenue during lean times for the organization.  Membership has dipped to 1.88 million girls, from 2.1 million three years ago, reported the Christian Science Monitor in January. And cookie sales have fallen, too, as hard as that may be to believe. They still generated a whopping $776 million in sales last year – some 194 million boxes – but that constituted 1 million fewer boxes than in 2014. 

According to the Monitor, Visa and Dell invested about $3 million this winter in a Girl Scout campaign designed to expand digital and app platforms with features encouraging girls to learn about math and technology – and how to use those skills to sell more cookies. Scouts can use the initiative, known as Digital Cookie, to set up websites that can take online orders and send email blasts to contacts. 

Girl Scout cookies trace their origin to a troop in Oklahoma in 1917, who organized a bake drive for their local high school, according to Business Insider. The major leap came in the mid-1930s, when a troop in Philadelphia decided to outsource the baking part to local bakeries, and market the sales in the windows of utility companies. For each box sold, 75 percent of the money goes to the local council, with the remainder going to the bakeries that produce them.

There are more than 28 flavors of Girl Scout cookies, and depending on the bakery that makes them, the flavors, and even the names, can vary by region. This can be confusing when Carmel deLites are also known as Samoas and those Do-si-dos might also go by Peanut Butter Sandwich. But flavors for the baking mixes will be straight shooters: Thin Mints and Caramel and Coconut.

Among contingents that might welcome the new bake mixes are top cops at the New York Police Department. Conflict-of-interest rules at the NYPD, reported WNYC last week, bar supervisors from selling their daughters' Girl Scout cookies to fellow employees. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Girl Scouts stir up baking mixes for home cooks
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Food/2016/0622/Girl-Scouts-stir-up-baking-mixes-for-home-cooks
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe