Crumbl: Can a Weekly Menu Keep Customers Coming Back?

Two Cousins and a Cookie Test

In 2017, cousins Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hemsley opened the first Crumbl bakery in Logan, Utah. McGowan had worked as a director of product at Ancestry.com, and the cousins treated their recipe like an experiment. McGowan later told Franchise Times that they compared versions of their chocolate chip cookie by asking people at local gas stations which one they preferred, wasting thousands of dollars of dough along the way. Crumbl built its bakeries with open kitchens so customers could watch cookies being mixed and baked. A second store opened in Orem, Utah, in January 2018. That year, Hemsley and some college classmates designed a pink box that holds four cookies side by side, and Crumbl began selling franchises so other owners could open stores.

A Menu That Disappears

Crumbl’s signature idea was a menu that kept changing. In 2021, each store kept two staple flavors, chocolate chip and classic sugar, and swapped the other four every week, drawing from a library of more than 170 recipes. Flavors such as sweet cornbread with honey buttercream frosting rotated in and out of the lineup. The cookies were large, about six ounces each. By late 2025, Bloomberg Businessweek reported, Crumbl was revealing each new lineup online on Sunday evenings, and only one cookie, milk chocolate chip, stayed on the menu from week to week. Most cookies sold for about $5 each.

Lines, Likes, and an App

Crumbl grew up on social media. By 2021 it had about 1.3 million followers on Instagram and nearly 3 million on TikTok, and its Unbox the Pink Box videos drew tens of thousands of views. A Canadian content creator with about 100,000 followers told Bloomberg Businessweek that lines were often longest about two hours before closing, when stores started running out of cookies. Crumbl also ran collaborations with celebrities such as Olivia Rodrigo and the Jonas Brothers, and a partnership made its signature shade, Crumbl Pink, an official Pantone color.

Technology shaped how people bought, too. Crumbl built its own point-of-sale system and an app that handled orders for delivery, curbside pickup, catering, and shipping, and it gave franchise owners a data platform that tracked sales and how long orders took. As of October 2026, members of its Crumbl Rewards program earned points called Crumbs: 10 per dollar at the starting Bronze level, rising to 13 per dollar at the top Pink level. Reaching the Silver level unlocked perks such as a free single dessert on the member’s birthday and the chance to vote on flavors, which members could do only in the Crumbl app. Crumbs expired a year after they were earned, and they could be earned only on orders placed through Crumbl’s own app and website, not through services such as Uber Eats or DoorDash.

Growth Outpaces Demand

Franchise owners opened stores at a remarkable pace, including 84 in 2020 alone. Crumbl had more than 260 stores in 36 states in October 2021 and more than 600 stores in 47 states by January 2023; within about six years of opening its first store, it had more than 950 locations. But sales per store did not keep up (see Exhibit 1). Average yearly sales per location peaked at $1.84 million in 2022, then dropped to $1.16 million in 2023. Around that time, Crumbl refreshed its look and dropped the word “cookies” from its logo, and McGowan, then the CEO, said the company planned to slow its growth in the coming years. By fall 2026, Crumbl’s website described its menu as six classics plus new weekly flavors, and the lineup for the week of October 12 included a brownie as well as cookies made with brand-name treats such as TWIX and OREO.

Where Things Stand

In October 2026, the trade publication Restaurant Business reported that at least 57 Crumbl locations had closed so far that year while 20 had opened, and that at least 55 franchises were listed for sale. Citing an internal document, it said Crumbl’s August sales were 70% lower than two years earlier; KUTV, a Salt Lake City TV station that reported the findings, said it had not independently reviewed that document. Foot traffic was down 32% from a year earlier, according to the data firm Placer.ai. A four-cookie box started at $14.99. An economist interviewed by KUTV said that when families face higher prices for gas and groceries, they sometimes cut out luxuries, large or small, and he added that Crumbl’s rapid expansion after the pandemic could also be a factor. Crumbl did not respond to KUTV’s requests for comment. As of October 2026, Crumbl still had more than 1,000 locations, but it faced a hard question: what keeps customers coming back once a weekly surprise is no longer new?