Surely you’ve seen those little girls in green, blue and brown uniforms on your doorstep asking you to buy cookies to support their troop. The Girl Scouts have now been selling cookies for one hundred years. According to the Girl Scouts Organization, 1917 was the year that they started selling cookies. Five years after Juliette Gordon Low created the Girl Scouts, a troop out of  Muskogee, Oklahoma, started baking cookies and sold them in the high school cafeteria as a service project.  

The trend continued into the 1920’s gaining popularity in Chicago, Illinois, when a director provided a recipe given to the council’s  approximately 2,000 girls and told them what it would cost to bake them and how much they should cost (25 or 35 cents per dozen cookies). The trend spread throughout the country as girls baked cookies at home with their mothers. Accompanied by adults, girls back then and girls today sell door to door.  In the 1950’s cookie sales increased and new cookies started to show up, including the widely known chocolate mint (aka the Thin Mint). Girls started to sell door to door in suburban areas and with tables in shopping malls. During the 1970’s the Girl Scouts reduced the number of bakers down to four to make sure that all the cookies looked the same from all the companies. In the 1990’s, they reduced the number of bakers to just two, ABC bakers and Little Brownie Bakers. At the turn of the century, the youngest of the Girl Scouts, Daisies could now start selling cookies! Today, girls can use an app to help their customers order cookies from all over the country. In 2016, Little Brownie Bakers introduced the first gluten-free cookie, the Toffee Tastics!

In celebration of this momentous occasion, the Girl Scouts in your area are selling cookies from February 10  to March 19.