Will This Cookie Crumbl?
Inside my wild deep dive for Bloomberg Businessweek
Dear Crunchwrap Nation,
Welcome back to The Crunchwrap! I’m somehow still writing you from Montreal, where I’m studying the culture of small bagels, 3:30 PM sunsets, and frostbite before I head back to New York.
Having been here for 10 weeks, I now feel totally qualified to tell you a few things about this place. For one, there’s a lot of bagged milk here and people hold the door for you even if it’s 10 degrees out and you’re an uncomfortably long distance away. And while Quebec famously has hostility toward the idea of monarchy, I’ve found that this reputation might be overblown. See?
Anyhow, in this Crunchwrap, I am offering you – my comely, loyal readers – a behind-the-scenes look at the 5000-word journey I took into the dark, sugary heart of the dessert chain Crumbl, which just went live yesterday over at Bloomberg Businessweek.
BUT FIRST…if you’re a new subscriber (hey), here’s a bit about this newsletter:
I’m Adam Chandler, a journalist who writes for a bunch of places about culture, work/labor, fast food, regular-speed food, business, Americana, and more. I’m also the author of two books, Drive-Thru Dreams and 99% Perspiration which, in spite of some really bad Elon Musk jokes, came out earlier this year to wide acclaim. (I occasionally do some unwieldy hand-talking on The History Channel’s The Food That Built America and other programs.)
In this newsletter, I cover Critical National Issues like waning social cohesion in America, which gifts to give the dirtbag in your life, Taco Bell’s latest gastronomic gambits, and the cultural endurance of Billy Joel. I welcome responses and gripes. If you’d like to support me, please check out my new book or forward this newsletter to an ex you might still have feelings for.
Limp Biscuits(?)
I had a blast writing about Crumbl (gift link), Utah’s most sugary export and America’s fastest-growing dessert chain. They opened stores in all 50 states in less than six years (which is totally nuts), now have 1,100 stores, and sell over a million cookies a day.
The deal with Crumbl, for the uninitiated, is that:
they hawk cookies (and now desserts) that change every single week, which creates a sense of scarcity and desperation
they have no shortage of deranged obsessives and crazed detractors
they are a terminally “online” brand that relies on social media hype and elaborate, decadent cookies that are designed to visually appeal to phone-addicted dingdongs (like me).
Here’s a bit about that from the piece:
Indeed, once you’re snared by Crumbl’s algorithm, your social media feed becomes an unrelenting farrago of pastel frosting, floral-shaped dollops of cream and caramel, Gobi-like dustings of cinnamon and sprinkles, and studs of streusel. You might find the concept of a strawberry-limeade cookie topped with Nerds unappealing, but watching a YouTube clip of someone crushing one from the front seat of their car might change your mind. This alchemy is how the company has managed to amass more than 10 million followers on TikTok, more than Starbucks and McDonald’s combined, helping Crumbl build a consumer base that’s 65% female and skews teenage or younger.
But this insane business model comes at a cost. For this story, I visited a test store in Alabama, ate several 1000-calorie cookies, and interviewed the CEO minutes before he laid off 10% of his corporate staff. Best of all, I spoke to overstretched franchisees, burnt out hourly shift workers, and jaded company expats, all of whom violated their NDAs to carp (anonymously) about what gets lost in translation (and sanity) when a social media-first brand tries to exist in the real world. Enjoy!
Quick Brag
My new book, 99% Perspiration, was named one of the Top 10 Business Books of 2025 by the Next Big Idea Club – the book club curated by social science luminaries Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink.
It’s all downhill from here, folks! Stay tuned for my upcoming collaboration with Malcolm Gladwell, tentatively titled, How the Tipping Point Got Its Groove Back.
Bonus Content
The perks of being a Crunchwrap reader are manifold and so, as a treat for you and a salve for my psychic wounds, I’ve rounded up the weirdest lines cut from my latest story, which my editor was wise enough to leave on the cutting room floor.
With the exception of one rotating standard – a Milk Chocolate Chip Cookie – every dessert at Crumbl disappears at week’s end, in many cases, never to return again. Poof! Tablespoon rasa. A recent prompt about bygone cookies on Reddit’s 90,000-member Crumbl community yielded several dozen poetic laments, many tinged with a longing reminiscent of Proust. (“If I’d known how good it was, I would have ordered more,” one lovelorn commenter wrote of the Chocolate-Covered Pretzel Pie Cookie. Another jilted Redditor visiting Crumbl on a day off to secure a beloved Cowboy Cookie only to find, “that shit was sold out. Broken heart.”)
In between ads for compounded GLP-1, mediagenic hunks of chocolate or toffee appear, studding the surface layers of enormous cookies like moon rocks on the lunar plain.
Crumbl, for its part, maintains total innocence and purity of heart, insisting that its desserts are meant to be shared – with friends and family, no less! – and, in what seems like either a smirk, a savvy gesture toward plausible deniability, or a basic misreading of the human condition, sells a branded pink cookie cutter for $4.99 to divide its items into fourths.
That’s it for this installment of Crunchwrap! Thank you as always for reading.
With love,
Adam
"Tablespoon Rasa" is brilliant. Great article, as always!