Girl Scouts Head into Cookie Season

With Girl Scout cookie season starting up, Google searches for the massive annual bake sale reached peak interest Friday, according to Google Trends. In the previous years, Google recorded the biggest interest in the search term between the end of January and the beginning of February. Most of the six to eight week bake sales that help Girl Scout troops and councils with their budgets take place between January and April across the United States. With around 200 million boxes sold every season, that's a US$800 million annual business.

The bake sale has been a tradition with the Girl Scouts of America for more than a hundred years. In 1935, the Girl Scouts of the Greater New York area commissioned commercially baked cookies for the first time. There are currently 12 different varieties of Girl Scout cookies on sale, including two regionally different types of S’mores cookies and the recently added Caramel Chocolate Chip. The ever-popular Thin Mints are the current top seller among the Girl Scout cookies, followed by Samoas, which are also called Caramel deLites depending on the producer.

Since 2014, Girl Scout cookies are also available online, which might have sparked even more interest in online searches. The Girl Scouts of America tout the program as a way for girls to develop entrepreneurial and marketing skills. Approximately 75 percent of the proceeds stay with the Girl Scouts and is split up between the local council and local troops organizing the bake sale.