Crumbl Cookies opening in Gig Harbor offers tastes, sights, smells fresh daily

Cupcakes? That’s soooo last decade.

Cookies, it seems, are the latest Big Thing in the dessert world.

Gig Harbor got its entry Oct. 21 with the opening of a Crumbl Cookie store at 4784 Borgen Blvd in the Costco complex. There are somewhere around 260 Crumbl franchises across the country, according to the company’s website, and they’re growing fast.

“Only a few months ago, no one knew what Crumbl was,” said Amy Beam, owner of the Gig Harbor franchise. “Now everyone is catching on.”

Crumbl’s schtick is an ever-changing menu of cookie flavors, rotated by the half-dozen every week. Two iconic flavors, a milk-chocolate chip and a chilled pink sugar cookie, are always on the menu. Four other flavors rotate in every week. The company is up to about 170 flavors, with more coming, Beam said.

The company likes to riff off favorite candies and desserts. Recent flavors, for instance, were chocolate Twix, bubble gum, peanut butter cup, and rice krispy.

Beam, 38, is a Gig Harbor mom who stumbled across Crumbl while vacationing in Utah three years ago.

“I’ve been kind of looking for something I could be passionate about,” she told The Gateway. “My sister told me about this cookie store, and said ‘You’ve got to check this out.’ I did, and the smell when I stepped inside the door was amazing. I thought, ‘This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.’”

Partners in the enterprise are her husband, Denton, who also runs a concrete construction company, and her “honorary kid Crumbl crew,” Peyton, 11, Paige, 10, and Bella, 5.

Her kids, she says, were wide-eyed when she told them her plans.

“Can you imagine?” she laughed. “My youngest daughter thinks she’s going to get a cookie every day.”

The store sells cookies in an iconic pink box of two sizes — four packs and 12-packs. A six-pack is expected to be added soon. There’s also a party box of 50 smaller cookies. And yes, you can buy just one cookie — they’re $4 apiece.

Everything is made from scratch, Beam said, and customers can watch the cookie dough being mixed and the cookies coming out of the oven.

“They are topped fresh, so you are handed a warm cookie,” she said.

Crumbl Cookies was founded in 2017 by two cousins, Jason McGown and Sawyer Helmsley in Logan, Utah, while Helmsley was attending Utah State University. Their goal, their website says, was “the perfect chocolate chip cookie.”

Crumble is now in 36 states and claims to be “the fastest-growing cookie company in the nation.”

Besides Gig Harbor, there are Crumbl stores in Puyallup, Bonney Lake and Federal Way.

Beam said the recipes for the rotating cookie flavors come from the company headquarters, but it’s up to each store to make them work. The sights, sounds and smells of that process are part of the store’s appeal, she said.

Beam said she likes the original chocolate chip, the Twix cookie and one that looks — and tastes — like a waffle.

“But my favorite is probably the cornbread cookie,” she said. “It sounds funny, but it tastes wonderful.”

This story was originally published October 22, 2021 at 5:00 AM.