This link shows a taste test between the cookies from both bakeries:
Best Girl Scout Cookies? ABC Bakery vs. Little Brownie Bakers | Raleigh News & Observer (newsobserver.com)
It’s The American Way.
Paywalled for me. Can you summarize?
I can
Peanut butter sandwiches (abc) were a little saltier with a more pronounced peanut flavor than dosidos (little brownie bakers)
ABC thin mints are lighter in color and had a slightly better chocolate flavor and were more minty. They didn’t mention what the other article said, which is that LBB thin mints are a little crisper.
ABC lemonade cookies have a tarter and more “real” lemon flavor, and thicker icing on the bottom. LBB lemonups have inspirational sayings on them, and many tasters thought they were waxy or tasted weird.
Peanut butter patties (ABC) and tagalongs (LBB) are very similar, but tasters slightly preferred ABC.
Trefoils (shortbread) were very similar. ABC was slightly more buttery, and LBB tasted a little more like vanilla
Caramel delites (ABC) had milk chocolate, and less coconut. Samoas (LBB) had dark chocolate, more coconut, and their coconut was toasted. They were crunchier and had a stronger chocolate flavor.
At the end, the article said that most of the taste testers were used to ABC cookies and might have preferred what they expected.
Thank you! I definitely agree with the Lemonades being more lemony and just better than the Lemonups I can get here.
We ordered some. I’ll let you know.
Oh, man, I read that as General Services Administration and I was trying to figure out what the heck the federal government was doing in the Girlscout cookie business.
Hey, that was great! I knew that there were two different bakers, but I hadn’t seen a direct taste test. It could go a long way toward explaining my disappointment - my cookies are Little Brownie Bakers, which lost in every cookie category I care about except Samoas - and indeed, Samoas were the least bad.
FYI. Keebler grasshoppers and Girl Scout thin mints ARE very similar, except the thin mints are coated in dark chocolate while grasshoppers are coated in milk chocolate.
Though both those chocolates should be in scare quotes, since as noted, they’re way waxy. Sort of like the difference between Palmer brand ‘chocolate’ stuff and real chocolates.
For sure. In fact, I just thought, "I bet the label says “chocolaty” coating rather than “chocolate,” so I checked the tagalongs box. Yup.
There are those who swear by the Walmart brand knock-off version of Thin Mints. Don’t know the name offhand, but they always come up when people are jonesing for some Thin Mint action.
The thin mints in my freezer are ABC baker’s
Yay, i guess.
FYI - Aldi’s versions of thin mints and Samoas are pretty accurate.
Those toffee-flavored cooking are gluten-free, which explains the unusual texture.
Was looking for a picture of the Thin Mints from my childhood. I found a reddit discussion which mentions an Australian cookie called a Mint Slice.
This matches my memory very well. I remember that they changed the recipe, so that the cookie had a raised relief of the Girl Scout logo, and then the mint layer was thinner. I would eat the cookies by scraping the the chocolate and mint layer with my teeth into my mouth and then eat the cookie by itself.
When I found out some years ago that the local council gets something like a quarter a box I stopped buying them and give the girl five bucks instead.
Many years ago my wife busted a Girl Scout for selling the previous year’s left over cookies. Maybe you got a stale batch.
Man I miss those Lemonade cookies
I mostly like Do-Si-Dos (the oatmeal/peanut butter sandwich) and Samoas. Not a huge mint fan, but I’ll eat Thin Mints if they’re frozen.
My wife knew a guy who bought 26 boxes of Thin Mints every year and froze them. Each box contains two tubes of cookies, and each week he would pull out one tube and eat them.