Those girl scout rascals were at my local grocery store yesterday, peddling their boxes of delicious, delicious thin mint cookies. All the other cookies flavors suck, but thin mints are absolutely delicious. Even better when you put them in the freezer for a half hour to freeze the outer layer of chocolate, making them crisper.
Well, $4 a box is pretty steep (apparently, the GSA pays only $0.80/box), and they are only sold for a few days out of the year. Surely the bakers who make them, or a competing firm offer the exact same cookies elsewhere…
Have you tried Keebler Grasshoppers? They’re not identical. They’re made with milk chocolate and Thin Mints are made with dark chocolate. But they’re supposed to be a good substitute. There are grocery store equivalents of other Girl Scout cookies, too.
Duane Reade/Walgreens drug stores have a house brand knock-off thin mint that’s very good. They also make a Samoa-like cookie that’s good enough the break the back of Big Girl Scout.
[li]Unless you live in a state where they’re called Caramel De-Lites, in which case, you can’t have any you freak.[/li]
Alright, I picked up a box of grasshoppers and a box of thin mints. Going to do a direct head : head comparison.
I’ll try the Walgreens one later. I mean, the same bakers who the GSA commissions to make their cookies aren’t going to idle their equipment the rest of the year, right? Someone must make an exact matching cookie.
Would you consider cookies (or girl scouts) to be cuisine? “Our salon for art, drama, literature, movies, music, comics, cuisine – all the artistic disciplines – if it’s about creativity, entertainment, or leisure, it goes here [Cafe Society].”
Dollar General has a house brand thin mint that is damned close to the real thing. If I remember right you get like 12 cookies for $2. It’s been a long time since I bought any.
Modern food production is batch-based and when one batch is done (e.g., all the Thin Mints the GSA can sell that year) they throw the switch and start turning out Pecan Sandies for Keebler.
You’d be amazed at at how few food plants turn out how many brands. Most commercial dog food is made in a half-dozen plants - that’s dozens of brands across multiple nominal makers.
There’s only two (maybe three, I think I heard they added one a few years back) bakers making GS cookies for the entire country. That’s over 200 million boxes a year–it seems like that would keep them busy for a fair bit of the year, honestly. Although Little Brownie is a subsidiary for Keebler, so any time they’re not making Girl Scout cookies, they have plenty of other things to be doing.
And I’d expect the actual recipes are the property of GSA, so anybody at either bakery using those recipes for another client would get their asses sued completely off. Without the exact same recipe, you’re not going to get the exact same cookie. You can get really, really, really close, but not quite the same. That makes it really unlikely someone sells an exact matching cookie. Very very very similar and equally as enjoyable, but not an exact match.
It may also help to think of your cookie price as buying a $2 box of cookies and making a $2 donation to the GSA, most of which stays with your local troop.
About .85 a box, but not paid by GSA. They’re done at the regional and local level. Only about 50 to 57cents goes to the troop. And any prizes awarded are paid for out of that. A little over 2 bucks goes to the regional council. Cite
There are equivalents to most of the GS cookies available at Dollar General for a buck a box. We decided buying them and donating $2.00 to the local troop would cost less and benefit the girls more.