Savannah Smiles are one of 11 varieties of fundraising cookies sold by Girl Scouts of the USA. The bite-sized lemon crescents come dusted with powdered sugar.
When Carolyn Ketchum, a Toronto native who grew up selling classic chocolate and vanilla-flavoured Girl Guide cookies door-to-door as a child, moved to the United States a few years ago, she couldn't understand why her friends and neighbours were so excited about the local Girl Scouts's wares.
"I thought, 'What are you talking about?' I mean, they're just cookies," Ms. Ketchum, who lives in Boston, recalled this week. But then she saw their offerings: boxes of doughnut-shaped shortbread "Samoas" that came covered in caramel and toasted coconut and then drizzled with chocolate, plus dulce de leche cookies, Ice Berry Pinatas, peanut butter sandwiches, lemon creams, and even a cranberry-and-chocolate cookie called "Thank U Berry Munch." The U.S. Girl Scouts even have an iPhone app that points consumers to the nearest cookie sellers.
"There are so many choices here and they're good," Ms. Ketchum said with a famished-sounding growl.
Or as she wrote on her popular baking blog, called All Day I Dream About Food: "As a child, I was sent out into the world to peddle boring sandwich cookies to my kind neighbours when I could have been enticing them with Samoas, Thin Mints and Tagalongs. It's just not right. Poor little Canadian Girl Guides."
A few weeks ago, Girl Scouts of the USA introduced a new cookie to its spring lineup, which now stands at 11 selections. The Savannah Smiles, as they're called, are bite-sized lemon cookie crescents that come dusted with powdered sugar.
Here in Canada, by contrast, the spring cookie season, which begins in March, features the "classic" mixed boxes of chocolate and vanilla sandwiches. The cookies will go for $5 per box (up from $4; the organization said its costs have risen by 25 per cent since the last price increase). In the fall, the Guides sell mint thins. And that's it.
Dave Pause, who runs the Girl Guides of Canada's cookie program, said the key reason for the less adventuresome Canadian selection is the organization's relationship with the cookies' manufacturer. In the United States, the manufacturers own the recipes and trademarks behind the Girl Scouts' cookies, and license them to the organization; manufacturers are always trying to develop new brands. Here in Canada, the Guides own the recipes and contract with the manufacturers, Mr. Pause said. (Dare Foods makes them – 5.34 million boxes worth last year – at its plants in Kitchener, Ont., and near Montreal.)
But there are other, cultural reasons, Mr. Pause said. Canadians don't like their cookies as supersweet as many of the U.S .ones are. We do like more flavour, however. The mint in the Guides' Chocolatey Mint cookies is much more intense than in the U.S. Girl Scouts' Thin Mints, he said.
And, as Mr. Pause pointed out, some U.S. Girl Scouts councils have even begun culling some of the varieties they sell – all that selection was starting to hurt profits. "Our top five varieties make up 77 per cent of cookie sales," Amanda Hamaker, who runs the organization's cookie program, told The Wall Street Journal last year. "The others are yummy and fun, but they're side dressing – leaving councils with an awful lot of alternate varieties left over."
"It's always a thought: At what point in time do we have to introduce a new cookie?" Mr. Pause said. He quickly added that he's not feeling the need. "We've sold out all our cookies in the last two years.
"We are selling the cookies as a fundraiser," he added. "We're raising funds for Girl Guides and the cookie's almost secondary. Our biggest issue is getting the girls in front of enough consumers. We haven't found anybody who says no to a cute little six-year-old."