Crumbl’s massive empire was never about the cookies

The age of froyo has faded. Fancy cupcakes are passé. The cronut craze is now a distant fever dream. Dessert trends can sweep by fast, and today we’re in the era of the elaborate cookie — kind of.

When Crumbl first burst onto the scene, the novelty was that the company had turned a relatively easy, low-fuss dessert that might come as a side to your food order into an enormous, over-the-top main attraction. A single Crumbl cookie can be somewhere around 5 inches in diameter, and unusual flavors in the past have included cornbread, churro, Biscoff lava, maple bacon, and more. They’re colorful and photogenic, packaged in a baby-pink box instantly recognizable even from a distance. Since 2017, the brand has grown rapidly, opening over 1,000 locations and becoming perhaps the most accessible cookie chain in the nation. But whether Crumbl is actually good depends greatly on who you ask, and that unsettled question helps fuel its continued popularity and relevance online.

Rather than offering a steady menu of reliably beloved cookies to get customers through the door, Crumbl courts online virality — whether it’s positive or not so much — with a revolving door of new desserts every week. Increasingly, they don’t just make cookies, but pies, cakes, ice cream, pudding, and more. The brand has over 9.6 million followers on its official TikTok account, but the real juice is in the multitudes of influencers regularly posting about Crumbl on the platform. Its decadent constructions, sometimes bafflingly unwieldy-looking, draw curiosity: What sugary invention will it try to pull off this time? Open TikTok on a Monday to see a fresh batch of Crumbl review videos, with countless creators enthusiastically biting into a new confection.

“This is an internet brand,” says Stephen Zagor, an adjunct business professor at Columbia University. Crumbl, as a company, is making “all the right marketing moves.” The company has not responded to a request for comment.

There’s no denying that Crumbl has harnessed the power of social media to grab — and, so far, hold on to — people’s precious attention. The question is whether it’s sustainable to be a dessert chain that’s entirely about pushing new trends and offering something ephemeral. If you’re any kind of content creator, the perpetual freshness is a boon. But if you’re just here to enjoy some dessert and stumble upon a flavor you love, good luck. It might take months to see it return, if it ever does.

How Crumbl grew and grew and grew

In an era of ghost kitchens, no other cookie chain has as big a physical presence as Crumbl today: Insomnia launched in 2003 and only has about 300 stores at this time, as does Mrs. Fields in the US. Levain, representing the fancier end of baked goods, opened in the ’90s and isn’t franchised, with just a few locations scattered around the country. Other newer competitors like Dirty Dough and Crave also have far fewer locations than Crumbl.

Crumbl’s founders, Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hemsley, are two cousins from Utah. Before they launched Crumbl in 2017, they “didn’t know anything about baking,” McGowan said in an interview with CEO Magazine. They had backgrounds in tech and marketing but thought they could give cookies a go; the company started franchising new locations quickly, opening hundreds per year.

“Very few brands I’ve seen have grown at that rate, especially brick and mortar,” says Kathleen Gosser, a professor of franchise management practice at the University of Louisville. But unlike Subway, which famously employed a strategy of opening too many stores, Gosser says that Crumbl seems to have been more strategic about spacing out their locations. “There’s not one on every corner,” Gosser says. In New York, for example, there are none yet in Brooklyn or Queens, and one on Staten Island, and a handful in Manhattan — including one in the West Village, ground zero for dessert crazes from cupcakes to cronuts, where I tried my first Crumbl cookie.

According to the mobile apps insights firm Sensor Tower, the Crumbl app has been downloaded over 6.4 million times in the US this year and is ranked 15th overall in the US Food & Drink category, which is impressive for a chain that only sells desserts (no coffee, as the founders are Mormon).

The internet just can’t stop talking about Crumbl

Most brands today rely on social media for at least some marketing. What sets Crumbl apart is that its products don’t just become a trend for influencers to glom onto when there’s an especially strange limited-edition flavor drop, like the recent collaboration between Oreo and Coke. While there are occasionally celebrity endorsements and tie-ins — an Olivia Rodrigo-themed cookie was released over the summer — most of the advertising also apparently happens organically. Dedicated content creators weigh in on weekly drops, using the popular (and sometimes polarizing) desserts as a vehicle for their own fame.

There’s a sustained hype machine built into Crumbl’s business model thanks to its regular carousel of new flavors, which serves as fodder for seemingly endless discourse as there’s a constantly refreshing feed of Crumbl content to consume. Some influencers loathe Crumbl; others can’t get enough. Taste tests are often titled something along the lines of “My honest thoughts on Crumbl,” as if to suggest they’re cutting through all the noise to deliver the definitive verdict on the cookies. The fact that the flavors are only available for one week also all but ensures a sense of urgency in the way luxury streetwear drops do. Online, people post “Crumbl spoilers” — leaked information about what flavors are coming in the next few weeks — though being a gold tier rewards member in the loyalty program gets you early access to its “weekly drop videos.”

The built-in scarcity means “people have to run to get there” when a new menu is unleashed, says Zagor.

Online mentions of Crumbl have ticked up in the past year — up 29 percent compared to 2023, according to the consumer insights company Brandwatch — but the biggest surge in attention hit a few months ago, when news of a Crumbl “pop-up” in Sydney, Australia, spread on social media. People lined up to pay $17.50 Australian (nearly $12 US) for a cookie, over double what it costs in the US for what turned out to be an unauthorized resale pop-up. For the people posting about it online, the virality of the single-day event was the highlight — blink and you might have missed it — and not so much the anticipation of how good the days-old imported cookies might taste (though many did remark on the staleness). Crumbl, for its part, chose not to take any legal action. In fact, the scandal revved up the brand’s plans to open its first store outside of North America in Australia.

Food marketing on social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram is especially alluring to young people because of how interactive it is, says Jennifer Harris, a senior research adviser of marketing at the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health. “You’re not just sitting watching television and passively viewing that anymore,” she tells Vox. “The changing flavors every week is also really attractive to kids who don’t want to miss out. [It’s] the FOMO factor.”

Can Crumbl keep serving up excitement?

It’s unlikely that the people clamoring for Crumbl don’t know that these gargantuan desserts probably aren’t healthy (a single cookie can run upward of 900 calories, but when it comes to digital content about the brand, the literal nutritional content of the desserts is irrelevant. The point is being in the know and keeping up with consumer trends, whether that’s a cookie or a skin care product. In a recent video, YouTuber Edvasian compared the Crumbl phenomenon to being the “fast fashion” of cookies. It’s yet another manifestation of hyper-consumption fueled by a conveyor belt of micro-trends that come and go at an ever-increasing pace. The brands need content creators for marketing, and the content creators need brands as a jumping off point for cultivating an audience. Behind every new Crumbl week is the possibility of viral fame.

This relationship between fast fashion and influencers is nothing new, but the juxtaposition is a little stranger when we’re talking about food — specifically, a kind of food that’s often an indulgent, nostalgic comfort. Dessert is a difficult category for companies to be successful in. “You’re constantly being measured against grandma’s cookies and the local bakeries’ cookies,” says Zagor. Crumbl provides adventure, but not familiarity, and not necessarily loyalty.

Despite Crumbl’s speed-run of success, there’s been some concerning signs in its recent performance. Its profits per store plummeted in 2023, down about 58 percent compared to the year before. This throws into question whether its height of popularity can be maintained, or whether the extravagant cookie trend could go the way of the froyo. Some customers grumble about the price of a single cookie compared to its quality, which can vary by week and by store. (A single cookie at my nearest Crumbl is $4.99; at Levain it’s $5.77, and most Insomnia cookies are $2.95.) The company has also been fairly aggressive about defending its perch as the cookie chain known for offering a weekly menu of inventive flavors. In 2022, it sued two much smaller competitors that also offer new flavors every week — Crave Cookies and Dirty Dough — for allegedly copying its strategy, trademarks, and packaging, even arguing that Dirty Dough stole many of Crumbl’s recipes. Crumbl has since agreed to resolve both lawsuits through a settlement.

The challenge is maintaining its momentum “in a world where everything is virtual and everything disappears with light — it’s so easy for somebody else to come along and take the spotlight away from them,” says Zagor.

My personal experience of Crumbl is that its desserts taste just fine. They’re not inedible — I enjoyed my tiny pecan pie — but neither is any of it memorable or something I would crave or reach for when the mood for something sweet strikes. “It’s as much air as there is substance,” Zagor explains. “It’s what you see, and what you hear, and what you read, and what the color of the box is.” The actual taste of the thing, in the face of so much other fluff, can’t help but recede into the background.