Crumbl Cookies crossed the $1 billion revenue mark faster than almost any food brand in recent memory. They went from a single location in Logan, Utah in 2017 to over 900 locations across the United States in less than a decade. That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen just because the cookies are good.
There’s a business model behind it. And interestingly, the brands that are pushing back against that model, smaller, direct-to-consumer gourmet cookie companies, are doing something worth paying attention to.
How Crumbl Built a Billion-Dollar Cookie Company
The Rotating Menu as a Retention Mechanism
This Crumbl business model analysis highlights how the brand’s weekly rotating menu is probably the most discussed part of their strategy, and for good reason. Every week, a new set of flavors drops. Last week’s flavors are gone. If you missed the Raspberry Cheesecake cookie, it might not come back for months.
That rotation creates urgency in a food category that doesn’t normally have any. Cookies aren’t seasonal produce. There’s no inherent reason to rush. But Crumbl manufactured scarcity within a product line that’s otherwise available year-round, and it worked. Customers started checking the app every Sunday night to see what was dropping the next week.
The rotating menu also gave people a reason to keep coming back beyond just craving a cookie. It turned cookie buying into something closer to a weekly ritual with a surprise element attached.
Social Media as the Primary Growth Engine
Crumbl didn’t grow through traditional advertising. They grew through TikTok and Instagram, specifically through the unboxing and taste-test video format that took off around 2020 and 2021. The pink box became recognizable before most people had ever been to a Crumbl location.
The visual format of their cookies, oversized, heavily decorated, clearly designed to photograph well, was not accidental. It was a product decision that doubled as a marketing decision. Every cookie that left a Crumbl store was a possible piece of content.
The Franchise Model at Speed
Crumbl franchised aggressively and quickly. Their franchise model was designed for fast replication, standardized recipes, centralized training, a supply chain built to support rapid location growth. That speed came with trade-offs in quality control that some customers noticed, but the volume more than compensated in revenue terms.
By the time competitors tried to catch up, Crumbl had already established name recognition that functioned like a barrier to entry in many markets.
Where the Crumbl Model Has Limits
For all the success, the Crumbl model has a specific set of constraints that don’t apply to smaller brands.
Franchise consistency is hard to maintain at scale. A cookie baked at a Crumbl in Phoenix and a cookie baked at a Crumbl in Charlotte are supposed to be identical, but the reality of human bakers, varying equipment, and franchisee training gaps means that’s not always the case. Reviews across locations vary noticeably.
The rotating menu also creates a specific kind of customer, one who’s engaged with the novelty rather than loyal to the product. When a brand’s value proposition is “something new every week,” the core product itself stops being the differentiator.
What Smaller Brands Are Doing Differently
Depth Over Novelty
Smaller gourmet cookie brands have taken a different approach. Instead of competing on rotation and scale, they compete on the depth of the product itself. A brand like Kiss My Butta Cookies, based in California and shipping nationwide, built a menu of flavors designed to be memorable on their own terms, not because they’re here today and gone next week, but because they’re actually that good.
Flavors like Midnight Crush and Brown Butta Bombshell aren’t named for novelty. They’re built around specific flavor profiles that give customers a reason to reorder the same thing, which is a fundamentally different retention model than Crumbl’s.
Direct-to-Consumer Margins
The franchise model requires Crumbl to share revenue with franchisees. Direct-to-consumer brands keep more of every dollar. For a small gourmet cookie brand selling online and shipping nationwide, that margin difference matters significantly when it comes to investing in product quality, packaging, and customer experience.
Community Over Reach
Smaller brands build communities rather than footprints. Kiss My Butta Cookies, for example, has built a following around an attitude and an aesthetic that their customers identify with. That kind of brand affinity is harder to build than a franchise location, but it’s also harder to replicate and harder to lose.
The customers who find a small gourmet cookie brand that genuinely resonates with them tend to become repeat buyers, gift-givers, and the kind of word-of-mouth marketers that no advertising budget can fully replace.
Fresh Product as a Differentiator
A cookie baked fresh to order and shipped directly to the customer is a fundamentally different product than one baked in a franchise kitchen according to a standardized schedule. Smaller brands that bake to order can credibly offer freshness as a differentiator. That’s not a claim available to any franchise model at scale.
The $1 Billion Question
Crumbl’s success is real and it’s instructive. They identified that cookies could be a social media product, that scarcity could be manufactured in a category with no natural scarcity, and that franchising at speed would build name recognition faster than quality alone could.
But the brands that are positioning themselves for the next phase of the gourmet cookie market are doing something different. They’re betting that once the novelty of the rotating menu wears off, what customers actually come back for is a cookie that’s worth eating, again and again, without needing a new flavor to justify it.
That bet is now looking like a reasonable one.
