Utah-based Crumbl Cookies opens 100th store less than 3 years after founding

A box of Crumbl cookies inside the company's headquarters in Orem.

(Graham Dudley, KSL.com)


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OREM — On the basement level of an Orem office building, just off I-15 on University Parkway, is the Crumbl Cookies test kitchen.

It's a space for bakers to experiment, create and innovate for the Crumbl menu which, other than its mainstay chocolate chip and sugar cookies, changes every week. And its location inside the sleek new Orem office speaks to the rapid growth of the company, which started in Logan in 2017 and just last week opened its 100th location, in Tega Cay, South Carolina.

Crumbl now has locations in 17 states and designs on getting into all 50 — and even beyond the states.

"Our CEO is from Canada," said chief operating officer Sawyer Hemsley in a news release, referring to his Crumbl co-founder Jason McGowan. "Who knows? Crumbl may be going international very soon."

Hemsley and McGowan were not bakers when they started the company, Crumbl vice president of marketing Britnee Nuehring explained to KSL.com. McGowan's background was in the tech industry and Hemsley was a student at Utah State University. "They just knew that Logan needed a cookie shop," Nuehring said.

"(McGowan's) whole philosophy was, let's A/B test our way to the perfect cookie," she said. "So our COO would make a batch and our CEO would make a batch, and they would just put them to the test. They would go to grocery stores and gas stations and have customers try them out, and say which one's better. They continued to refine and test, and that's how we ended up with this cookie."

Crumbl is available for takeout and delivery and can even be shipped nationwide, making it a largely pandemic-proof business, Nuehring said. Gift boxes of cookies have become more popular this year.

"That's really fun to see that, especially with everything going on right now, I think that people haven't known what to do for people," she said. "So we've gotten a major influx in gifts, people sending cookies to say 'I'm thinking of you.' That's been really neat."

Nuehring said Crumbl has been "really, really blessed" to have its business model during the pandemic. "The food industry has been hit hard," she said, "but luckily, I think our business lends itself to takeout already.

"I think people have, since the dawn of time, turned to yummy treats as a coping mechanism," she added. "So I think we've been beneficiaries of that, too."

Crumbl serves ice cream in addition to its cookies. It has 22 Utah locations and can be ordered online at crumblcookies.com.

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Graham Dudley reports on politics, breaking news and more for KSL.com. A native Texan, Graham's work has previously appeared in the Brownwood (Texas) Bulletin and The Oklahoma Daily.

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