It’s 8 p.m. on a Monday in Dallas. It might rain. But that doesn’t stop dozens of people from walking up to Crumbl Cookies in Dallas and taking a spot in line, outside in the summer heat.
The line moves fast — they’re just selling cookies, after all — but there’s still something curious going on here in an East Dallas strip center. The college kids, parents, high-schoolers and middle-schoolers in line are smiling. They’re taking photos. They’re contentedly standing there, waiting.
That’s a lot of patience for cookies.
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“It just blows my mind,” says Jennifer Russell, the store manager at the shop on Northwest Highway, near Skillman Road, in East Dallas. “Every day, it’s busy like this in the evenings.”
Sometimes, the line stretches down the block and around the corner.
The Utah-based company has managed to create this kind of cookie fervor all over the country. It was started by Sawyer Hemsley when he was in college in 2017, and since then, it has been franchised to 221 stores across the United States, with 50 more opening by the end of the year.
About a dozen cookie shops are in Dallas-Fort Worth; more are coming soon. McKinney residents Bryce and Lisa Dean operate this Dallas shop.
The company’s “thing” is big cookies, about the size of your palm. The menu changes weekly, and that’s one of the reasons fans keep coming back: to re-do a taste-test of the four new cookies that become available every Monday alongside the two staples that are always on the menu, milk chocolate chip and chilled sugar cookie.
Crumbl’s fans seem to delight in trying flavors like Sour Patch Kid, pumpkin cake, chilled eggnog, churro and mint brownie.
So what makes these cookies different than any others around town? Dallas has no shortage of sweets shops, with cookie companies like Tiff’s Treats and Pokey O’s having a longtime presence locally, and newcomers like Insomnia Cookies moving in. Crumbl’s rotating menu surely has something to do with its fervor. And so does social media: One Dallas fan, 19-year-old Rhett Bailey, heard about Crumbl Cookies on TikTok, a place where lots of fans host short taste tests every week.
Bailey spent about a half hour inside and outside of Crumbl Cookies recently, so he could take some home and enjoy them with friends.
“The fun is the taste test,” he says. “We’ll cut them up and try them all at the same time.”
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And Monday is the day to go.
“Since we’ve gone viral on TikTok, Mondays have been a huge influx,” says Anna Tibbitts, Crumbl’s public relations manager. “We’re closed on Sundays, and Monday is the first day we release these flavors.” Across the country, she says, TikTok creators tend to be the first ones in line.
Once customers (finally) get inside the store, it’s a blast of sugar and butter in there. About six bakers work in the open kitchen in Dallas, weighing each cookie and shaping it precisely. Because the company is a franchise, the corporate office takes lengths to ensure the cookies are consistent across its hundreds of stores, Russell says. Her staff learns to bake new cookies every week, following a specific set of rules for baking and frosting each one.
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Cookies are most often purchased in denominations of four, for $13.98. A single cookie costs $3.98, and a 12-cookie party pack costs $34.88. The cookies are also available via delivery with DoorDash.
After customers buy their cookies on site, it’s a dine-and-dash situation, as there’s nowhere to sit inside the shop. One franchisee in Virginia described Crumbl as “kind of like the Apple Store of cookies” because of its tech-forward design. Two big TV screens inside the Northwest Highway shop show TikTok videos of people eating their cookies, perhaps reminding customers how they can continue to tell Crumbl’s sweet story.
Crumbl’s flagship TikTok account has its own celebrity, too, with some videos getting over 2 million views.
Each customer leaves with a light pink box. It’s a badge of honor: They waited, they got cookies, and they’re gonna post a video to prove it.
Crumbl Cookies in D-FW are in Allen, Plano, Wylie, Garland, Dallas, Southlake, Fort Worth, Burleson, Mansfield and Grand Prairie.
For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.
The Link LonkJune 25, 2021 at 02:08AM
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