Big Cookie has invaded Philly (and America). Why is it so crummy?

When Levain Bakery opened its 15th location on Walnut Street last fall, the line wrapped around the block — something the 30-year-old New York City institution is famous for commanding. The bakery case was stocked with crusty baguettes, sugared blueberry muffins, and slices of banana chocolate chip cake. But the crowd was here for one thing: Levain’s massive 6-ounce cookies, chockablock with gooey chocolate.

If the crowds just wanted any colossal cookie, they needn’t have waited. In all of Philadelphia, there’s ostensibly no easier place to satisfy that craving right now than Rittenhouse. The neighborhood has been swarmed in the last year or so by cookie companies. Besides Levain, there’s Blueprint Cookies at 20th and Manning, Chip City at 17th and Walnut, and Taylor Chip at 18th and Chestnut — not to mention the old faithful, Insomnia Cookies at 16th and Sansom (slinging regular-sized cookies there since 2012).

Beyond Rittenhouse, the greater Philly region has become occupied by what I’ve come to think of as Big Cookie: companies touting pancake-sized cookies and even larger ambitions. There’s Bang Cookies in King of Prussia, Cookie Plug in Media, Dirty Dough in Warrington, Crave Cookies in Deptford, plus a dozen Crumbl locations scattered throughout the suburbs.

Setting Levain and Insomnia aside for the moment, these businesses have lots in common, from their sleekly designed cookie boxes to their eerily similar storefronts. Visit any one of them and you can almost certainly fill up your bingo card: Neon sign? Pastel paint? A cute illustration? A small, not-terribly-inviting seating area? Bingo.

Even more similar are what they sell. Their cookies weigh in at 5-plus ounces — more than double your average two-tablespoon cookie — and come in a half-dozen flavors or more (many more, in some cases), often rotating on a weekly basis. And a single cookie costs at least $5.

By the looks of social media, people are more than happy to pay. There are seemingly infinite Instagram reels and TikTok videos that feature people eating these cookies (often in their cars) and singing their praises. “This one cookie cost $7, but it’s huge,” reasons one poster holding up a strawberry shortcake cookie nearly as big as her face. “This is what a cookie is supposed to be like,” gushes another, chomping down on a Biscoff-flavored cookie stuffed with a whole Oreo. If they’re not biting into them, the influencers zoom in for a “cookie break,” in which they gently snap a warm cookie in half to reveal its beguiling core — be it filled with melting chocolate or apple pie filling or soft caramel that stretches between the two halves.

I toured Rittenhouse’s Big Cookie scene with a friend recently. In one shop after the next, we warily eyed displays of dauntingly large cookies, often densely laden with chocolate chunks, marshmallows, and icing. Eaten warm, the underbaked cookies oozed raw filling; there was no contrast, no crunch or chew, just mushy gobs of half-cooked dough. What struck me as an even bigger grievance is that cookies looked so physically unappealing: some as broad and thick as a Frisbee, some humpbacked from their chocolate lava or cookie butter filling, some so startlingly splotchy, they resembled something you’d clean up after a frat party. We took one bite of each. Hours later, my friend texted, still haunted by the experience: “Those were so bad.”

Somewhere along the way in the past decade, a subset of the American population left behind the three-bite butter cookie from ye olde neighborhood bakery and embraced these built-for-social-media behemoths instead — the confectionary manifestation of go big or go home. The result is a market flooded with giant cookies that people pay a fortune for.

How did we enter the era of Big Cookie?

The Big Cookie players all serve up huge cookies, but their businesses come in varying sizes. On the modest end, there are budding outfits like Jersey City’s Bang Cookies and central Pennsylvania’s Taylor Chip, each with seven locations. Above them are a handful of midsize franchises like Dirty Dough (75 locations in 27 states, with two dozen more coming soon) out of Utah and New York’s Chip City (45 locations and counting in nine states).

The Goliath of the category, far and away, is Crumbl. The young franchise snowballed like no other, opening more than 1,000 locations in all 50 states, plus Canada, in just six years. Crumbl popularized the model of dropping new flavors each week, a feature that hooks content creators and customers alike, generating perpetual social media buzz and an estimated $1 billion in annual sales.

Just as Big Tech got started by dropouts in garages, Big Cookie has its own recurring storylines. Chief among them is that its businesses have largely been founded by people with zero professional baking experience. That’s not a point of shame — it’s a badge of honor for the likes of Crumbl CEO Jason McGowan, who started the company with cousin Sawyer Hemsley in Utah in 2017. “I loved technology and wanted to build some technology around food delivery. Sawyer loved baking and entrepreneurship,” McGowan told Restaurant Business in 2022.

We were like, ‘Oh, let’s just start making some cookies. How hard could this be?’”

Instead of hiring a baker, Crumbl’s founders went through thousands of pounds of dough, tweaking ingredients and scrapping contractor bags full of unworthy batches until they arrived at their now-signature chocolate chip cookie. Before opening their first store, they solicited feedback from people in parking lots and at gas stations, swapping free cookies for opinions. (The recipe is closely guarded but reportedly uses salted butter, real vanilla, and Guittard chocolate chips.) McGowan paints the beginning as a comical amateur experiment that led to one of the highest-grossing cookies of all time: “We crowd-sourced and taste-tested our way to the perfect chocolate chip cookie.”

The cart also came before the cookie for Chip City. “It started off with the space,” cofounder Peter Phillips told The Inquirer. He remembers showing business partner Teddy Gailas a 250-square-foot space in Astoria, Queens, in 2017. “We were brainstorming what we could fit into such a small footprint. And we were both fans of cookies, you know, as a business model — we’ve seen some other companies grow and do very well. We thought we could do something new and innovative with our creative menu of flavors.”

Blueprint Cookies’ Florida-based founders Nick Hicks and Adam August freely admit they had “no idea how to make cookies” and credit their starting recipes to Max Santiago, a seasoned Miami pastry chef who responded to a call on LinkedIn. According to Blueprint’s company history, “it was a belief and a commitment to each other that gave them the confidence to start a cookie company with no experience and no cookies” in 2019. Two Bucks County natives — one in real estate, the other in business consulting — brought Blueprint to Philadelphia in 2023, telling Philly Voice the city “kinda lacks a good local core gourmet cookie.” (Blueprint’s Rittenhouse store is directly across the street from Bakeshop on 20th and a block from Metropolitan Bakery, both purveyors of what I would consider “gourmet” cookies.)

Not all Big Cookie origin stories are so colorless. Taylor Chip’s husband-and-wife founders, Doug and Sara Taylor, recount a year of date nights spent recreating Doug’s favorite Crisco-based chocolate chip cookie with real butter. That eventually led to them quitting their day jobs (inspecting homes and bartending, respectively) to launch a cookie stand in a Lancaster food hall in 2018. “We ended up doing about $800,000 of revenue out of our little market stand,” Doug Taylor told me. Now they’re building a multimillion-dollar production facility in Lancaster County to supply current and future stores with dough (and ice cream).

The Taylors may be in one state (plus nationwide shipping) for now, but they’re actively courting outside investment so they can scale up. “Our north star is 40,000 stores in 100 countries,” Doug said. They pride themselves on “elevating the cookie experience” with local ingredients like Wilbur chocolate and Hammond’s pretzels, as well as scratch-made inclusions (the technical term for stuff that goes into cookie dough). “We don’t use any nasty gums or anything like that,” Doug said, adding that Taylor Chip has more always-available variety (24 to 30 flavors at a time) than its competitors.

The least cookie-cutter of these companies is Cookie Plug, a graffiti- and hip-hop-inflected chain out of Southern California. Founder Erik Martinez has told interviewers he looked at the cookie landscape and thought, “They all just kind of blend in. Let’s put a gangster twist on it.” The company has stirred controversy as it’s spread over 14 states, with critics accusing it of cultural appropriation and racism. Its menu features so many drug references (dubsack, poppers, phatties, etc.), that the company website specifies that its cookies are “100% kid-friendly” and free of cannabis, THC, or CBD. (“The only high you’re getting from our cookies is a sugar high!“) The store also sells purple lemonade — marketed as purple drank, another drug reference — in a baby bottle.

“Cookie Plug is not just a cookie store. It’s a whole theme,” said Khaled Salem, who opened a branch in Media last year. A floor-to-ceiling streetscape mural of cookies strewn amid boom boxes and spray paint canisters papers its walls. Salem runs a few companies dedicated to last-mile logistics, and he wanted to add something fun to his business portfolio. Cookie Plug fit the bill. He describes its large, cylindrical cookies as “part-cookie, part-brownie, part-cake.”

“People who come to our store and buy the cookies, some of them just open it out of the box or the bag and eat it in front of us and say, ‘Wow, this is great, this is better than Crumbl,’” Salem said.

With so many competitors, it’s no surprise Big Cookie is obsessed with “innovation.” Sure, they respect the chocolate chip; you’ll always find one version of it or another on their ever-rotating menus. But it will be attended by a panoply of envelope-pushing flavors. The overwhelming trend is to cookie-fy other sweets: salted caramel pretzels, éclairs, caramel apple cider doughnuts, blueberry Eggo waffles, piña coladas, bubblegum. This is to say nothing of the hot honey cornbread cookie, or the almost everything bagel cookie.

Each Frankensteined dessert begs the question: Was there anything wrong with a simple snickerdoodle or a thumbprint? Who’s responsible for these cookie monsters?

Many would lay the blame for Big Cookie’s proliferation at Crumbl’s feet — including its distant rivals.

“Crumbl Cookies kind of ruined the industry. They proved this model of, ‘Wow, you can make money doing cookies,’” Doug Taylor, of Taylor Chip, said without a sprinkle of irony.

There’s all kinds of new franchises popping up all the time that basically copy the Crumbl model and hope to get some of that cookie cash.”

It is undeniable that Crumbl inspired other cookie companies. Just Google “Utah Cookie Wars” — a tangle of copyright lawsuits between Crumbl, Dirty Dough, and Crave Cookies. But the Utah company has important predecessors.

The 1970s saw the emergence of cookie brands that became household names: vending-machine staple Famous Amos and Mrs. Fields, which took American malls by storm in the ’80s and ’90s. Also founded in the ’70s were Great American Cookie Co., another mainly mall contender, and David’s Cookies, started by a Manhattan chef whose claim to fame was creating chocolate chunk cookies (by hand-cutting slabs of Lindt dark chocolate).

The modern-day business that cleared a path for Big Cookie — getting it outside the mall — is Philadelphia’s own Insomnia Cookies. Seth Berkowitz launched the now-international cookie company in 2002 while he was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania; frustrated at the lack of sweet delivery options, the economics major began baking cookies to order in his off-campus house kitchen, delivering them himself until 2 a.m. Insomnia opened its 300th store last summer and aims to add 1,800 stores in the next decade — an impressive goal given that it’s not a franchise and runs much of its delivery service in-house.

Between 2003 and 2011, however, the business scratched and clawed its way to stability. Postcollege, Berkowitz and a former business partner moved to establish Insomnia as a full-fledged entity but hedged their bets: They folded the cookie operation into the operations of a then-popular frozen-yogurt shop, Tasti D-Lite, opening licensed locations of the chain in Syracuse, N.Y.; Champaign, Ill.; College Park, Md.; and later Atlanta. As froyo’s glory faded, their business foundered. Insomnia didn’t take off until Berkowitz (sans his partner) converted the frozen yogurt shops to dedicated Insomnia Cookies stores circa 2006. Even after his early stores started making a profit, Berkowitz scrounged for outside investment year after year, eking out the Great Recession. The dawn of the smartphone and food-delivery apps helped the company find its footing.

In an interview with The Inquirer, Berkowitz also emphasized the importance of carefully selected real estate for its retail stores. “It is what makes it work for us,” Berkowitz said. As an example, he recounted his skepticism when a former VP of operations recommended opening another Philadelphia store at 13th and Sansom — three blocks from its 16th Street shop.

“‘You can’t cross Broad Street,‘” Berkowitz remembered the VP telling him, insisting that these two locations would capture different audiences. Berkowitz relented. “[Those two stores] were top 10 in the country until the pandemic, for years and years,” he said. “They’re still terrific.”

Between its real estate portfolio and its aptitude for delivery, Insomnia became so successful that it caught the eye of big-time backers; Krispy Kreme bought a majority stake in 2018 (the doughnut maker sold most of its holdings last year to two private-equity firms). Other investors have followed suit, plowing money into cookie enterprises like Chip City and Dirty Dough, enabling their spread across the country.

If you, like me, don’t spend any time on TikTok, the pervasiveness of Crumbl reviews is hard to fathom. Google indicates Crumbl Cookies has more than 260 million related posts on TikTok alone. People dissect their cookies on Instagram and Reddit, too, debating their merits and deficiencies. The constant churn of flavors stokes a never-ending conversation — a quality every Crumbl competitors strives to recreate around their own product.

Still, hype videos only last so long in any given algorithm. The buzz that underpins these cookie companies leads to an obvious question: Isn’t this just a fad? First froyo and then cupcake stores — all the rage in the aughts, smooshed by 2013 — petered out. Won’t Big Cookie go belly up, too?

Crumbl franchisee Chris Hummer fielded this question from friends before he opened the first Philly-area Crumbl in Jenkintown in 2021. “Everybody loves cookies, man. It’s not a cupcake,” he told them. “Cookies are super-portable. They have good shelf life. … People have been buying cookies forever, before these [quick-service restaurant] franchise chains were a thing.”

Cookies do possess some qualities that make them a more durable dessert than others. Dough can be mixed, portioned, and shipped off-site, then baked from frozen at a storefront. Besides ensuring standardization, centralized production and distribution makes these retail outposts “labor-light.” Often, all employees need to do in the kitchen is pop cookies in and out of the oven. (The Rittenhouse locations of Taylor Chip, Chip City, and Blueprint Cookies were each staffed by one employee, occasionally two, over repeated visits. This was also the case on visits to Cookie Plug and Insomnia.)

Crumbl defies the labor-light model by mixing on site at each of their stores. Hummer estimated he’s hired about 75 people before opening each of his three Pennsylvania stores — he’s opening more near his home in northern Virginia — with an expectation that a good number will drop out. To counterbalance labor-intensive production, Crumbl deploys a kiosk interface and a sleekly designed app so customers can buy cookies without talking to anyone.

“During our birthday week, Crumbl was the No. 5 or 6 overall app download on the app store, period — not food and beverage, period. And they were the No. 1 food app. Above McDonald’s, Starbucks, everything,” Hummer said. Crumbl’s in-house software also feeds hundreds of recipes to franchisees, informing them of new flavors coming down the pike six weeks in advance. This is one of Crumbl’s “amazingly unique” qualities, in Hummer’s opinion. “Crumbl … could bill themselves at times as a tech company that happens to make desserts,” he said.

This is another underlying characteristic of Big Cookie: The baked good is seldom the beating heart of these businesses. The end product — cookies — is simply what makes the endeavor “fun” for whoever’s paying the franchising fee.

Crumbl took pages from Insomnia’s playbook but deviated in two notable ways. Whereas Insomnia initially pursued real estate on busy downtown blocks and bustling college towns, Crumbl did almost the opposite. “The first place they want you is a Target parking lot. If not a Target, then a Costco type of a thing,” Chris Hummer said, describing his marching orders from Crumbl HQ when scoping out sites for his stores. “What you’re looking for is the middle-class mom that’s buying for the kids.”

Then there was Crumbl’s enormous product, nearly three times the size of an average cookie. Hummer said.

I think Crumbl just stumbled on doing a big cookie as a novelty item that got people’s attention.”

I’ll bet you any self-respecting New Yorker would stop Hummer right there and correct him as to who really proved the power of a big cookie: Levain.

Ever since Levain’s 6-ounce “mountain of a cookie” was written up in the New York Times in 1997, they have been breathlessly praised by cookie connoisseurs and national food media. “If there’s anything in this world you can count on, it’s a Levain Bakery chocolate-chip-walnut cookie,” reads a 2019 Grub Street story on the bakery’s then-nascent plans for national expansion following private-equity investment. (Crumbl, meanwhile, has been skewered as “overhyped and underbaked” by various outlets.)

If Insomnia piloted a strategy for standalone cookie storefronts, Levain showed just how seductive a big cookie can be. Long before the first Crumbl, Levain’s gooey cookies were thoroughly documented on social media, its lines the stuff of legend.

Should Levain get lumped into Big Cookie? At $5.25 a cookie, the price is right. But the bakery doesn’t resort to wacky new flavors: It took founders Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald 25 years to offer a chocolate chip cookie without walnuts. They bake everything from scratch in-store and frame their expansion as an effort to hold onto great staffers.

Levain bucks Big Cookie tropes in other ways. Weekes and McDonald did time in other industries, but McDonald went to culinary school and Weekes had been a home baker since a young age. When they opened the bakery in a Manhattan basement storefront in 1995, bread was center stage. (Levain is French for “leaven” and also a type of sourdough starter.) Weekes and McDonald were triatheletes and made massive cookies as personal rewards during training; selling them to customers was almost an afterthought.

As the cookies began to eclipse the bread, they took the hint and scaled back on other baked goods — going so far as to open a cookie-only Levain location in 2010. “By that point, we thought no one really cared about the bread anymore,” McDonald told me. “You wouldn’t believe the reaction that we got. People were so upset that their favorite bread items weren’t there.”

Weekes and McDonald don’t categorize Levain as a cookie company, even if cookie sales represent a reported 85% of their revenue. “We think of ourselves as an artisan bakery who makes really good cookies,” McDonald said.

Still, Weekes and McDonald acknowledge they’ve had a hand in the current cookie craze. Asked if there’s a connection between their own now-national enterprise and the various oversized-cookie shops, “It’s hard to think there’s not,” Weekes said.

Because of the bakery, because of the lines, and because it became such a phenomenon, I think it inspired people, I do. Just as “Magnolia [Bakery] inspired the cupcake trend, that has to start somewhere.”

There are signs these chains are already sensing consumers’ hunger for something else. Last year Chip City introduced thin chips (a.k.a. regular cookies) and Cookie Plug unveiled “poppers,” two-bite versions of its giant molded cookie. Taylor Chip is broadening its appeal with ice cream and coffee, beginning with its Philly stores. Crumbl is diversifying, too. The franchise took cookies out of its name in 2023 and started marketing its weekly goods as “desserts” last year, introducing pies and cakes after store profits dipped and some locations closed. Savory offerings may be next: Crumbl’s cofounder acquired a nascent Utah pot pie franchise in 2023.

What will we be left with, besides empty storefronts, if Big Cookie collapses? Arguably something better.

There’s a cookie operator in Philly I haven’t yet mentioned, one that’s flourished here for 45 years. It’s Famous 4th Street Cookie Co., and I offer it to you as the antidote to Big Cookie.

Famous 4th Street Cookie’s origin story varies, depending on whether you ask David or Janie Auspitz, its husband-and-wife founders, but the cookies were introduced at Famous 4th Street Deli around 1978. They became so popular the Auspitzes opened a stand in Reading Terminal Market just for cookies soon after. They started shipping nationally in later years. Eventually, the cookie company became “the tail wagging the dog,” David Auspitz told me. He and Janie sold the company in 2016 to Brian and Tina Phillips, who moved production from Queen Village to East Falls. The Phillipses have grown their mail-order business exponentially and are planning another move, to a 30,000-square-foot facility, also in East Falls.

Despite the bigger digs, the Phillipses say they don’t aspire to build an empire of retail locations. Besides the East Falls and Reading Terminal shops, Famous 4th Street Cookie shares three seasonal Jersey Shore boardwalk storefronts with Bassett’s Ice Cream.

Famous has expanded its flavor options from 12 to 20-plus under the Phillips’ direction, but to date, none of the cookies have broken with the 2-ounce format. None have been stuffed with marshmallow fluff or Oreos. There have been no flashy brand collaborations.

I don’t want Fruity Pebbles on my cookie. Maybe there’s an appeal to some people in the world, and that’s great. There’s plenty of room for everyone. But our company, what makes us different is ... we’re really focused on making cookies.”

To my mind, what really sets Famous apart is its price. They make a high-quality cookie — they use King Arthur Flour, Guittard chocolate, grade AA butter — that costs $2 a piece, less if you buy more. “We sell abundance,” Brian Phillips said.

For as far back as David Auspitz can remember, Famous has practiced the dollar holler, dropping the price of a cookie to $1 during the last hour of the business. Go to the Terminal and fork over a buck, take a bite and it’ll be chewy, baked through, and polished off before you’ve walked out the door. In a world where the $5 5-ounce cookie is becoming the norm, it’s sweet relief.