Like the slightly regretful sugar crash after a Halloween night, biting into a face-sized cookie from Crumbl Cookies emulates the same feeling of short-lived happiness and sugar-induced nausea.
Just like when we were kids tempted by the candy bowl, the freedom to indulge and treat ourselves trumps all rational thought.
Crumbl Cookies has an effortless ability to attract young customers, and it can be attributed to their experimental marketing, like the weekly release of flavors.
Although there is the anxiety of missing a good flavor week or saying goodbye to your favorite flavor, the concept has customers chronically checking their Instagram or the Crumbl website every Sunday afternoon to see what’s new.
Each time I see the signature pink logo with the black bubble letters, I—like most teenagers—get excited to see what Crumbl has in store for the week. I specifically search for the weirdly creative ones like the Cornbread or Caramel Apple Cookie that somehow make my mouth water despite how odd-sounding they are.
Every week, it’s almost guaranteed that someone will bring up Crumbl Cookie flavors, and it’s likely to strike up an exhilarated chatter from any teenager. Whether it be weekly Crumbl customers or people who are simply curious, Crumbl’s marketing strategies are proving to be effective at attracting business and being all the rage.
Teenagers, especially, fall victim to these tactics. As their wallets grow thinner and their teeth risk cavities, it begs the question of whether Crumbl’s actual products–their cookies–live up to the stellar branding they’ve created.
After a thorough review of my personal experiences, I think the cookies themselves are a little disappointing.
The boost of dopamine I get when looking at Crumbl’s flavor line-up easily upstages any feelings I have when I actually bite into a Crumbl cookie.
The taste isn’t spectacular enough to make up for its popularity or price. When eating one, I’m just overwhelmed by an attack of sweetness. Rather than introducing a complexity of flavors, it simply overloads your system with an abundance of sugar.
The few times I’ve gone to Crumbl with my friends, we’d somehow end up committing to a 6-pack of cookies because we felt like the price was more justifiable than a $5 cookie for each of us.
15 minutes later, we’d all lay comatose in the car battling the sugar demons. Nearby, our 6-pack box of severely underbaked cookies would lay open, displaying our wasteful little bites out of them and taunting us with our failures to enjoy the expensive treats.
While my experiences have ended with regrets, I admit there could be a great-tasting cookie from Crumbl that totally rocks my world. However, I have yet to find one, and it’s pretty hard to justify spending essentially $30 a week searching.
