Every year thousands of people excitedly wait for their community’s cookie season. But what’s all the hype about? Are Girl Scout cookies even that good? Why are they sold in such large quantities? In order to answer these questions, I went a couple different places.

Let’s get to know some background information from the cookie masters themselves. According to GirlScouts.org, the scouts have been selling cookies for a whole century, starting all the way back in 1917. The first sale was just five years after Juliette Gordon Low started Girl Scouts in the United States. The Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Oklahoma, baked cookies and sold them in its high school cafeteria as a service project.

Most Girl Scout troops get all of their funding from this one big sale of the year. The cool thing about this fundraiser is that all the money stays local. The Scouts decide what to do with their money after they’ve earned it, and usually, they give back to their communities. But, they need to fund themselves as well. The money the Scouts keep goes to funding educational activities and community projects, in which they get to be involved.

Recently the organization has even introduced a Digital Cookie Platform. Through this platform, girls can keep track of orders, and gain new business skills, as well as invite customers to order cookies online. However, this program doesn’t eliminate any of the old-fashioned communications. The girls still have to initiate a sale, whether it’s by email, or on their mobile app. If you know a Girl Scout, you can get to her personalized website by asking for it, and then you can have an order shipped, delivered by a girl scout, or even donated to charity. This opens a lot more doors for sales for many girls.

As for the cookies, the flavors keep growing. This season they’re selling two types of S’mores cookies, Thin Mints, Caramel deLites/ Samoas, Peanut Butter Patties/ Tagalongs, Shortbread/ Trefoils, Peanut Butter Sandwiches/ Do-si-dos, Lemonades, Savannah Smiles, Thanks-a-lots, Toffee-tastics, and Trios.

What’s the reason for some of these double names though? Well, Girl Scouts cookies are only made in two licensed baker’s “factories.” While the cookies may be called Trefoils in one factory, they have to be called Shortbread in another. The cookies are still very similar, in fact almost exact, they just have a few varying ingredients.

Girl Scouts Cookies are also friendly to a variety of communities, seeing as they are all kosher. The Girl Scouts of the USA also proudly claim their cookies have zero trans-fats. One of the bakers, Little Brownie Bakers, even has completely eliminated high-fructose corn syrup from their recipes. Most cookies contain palm oil, which has been sourced responsibly. In fact, the companies try as hard as they can to make sure their resources are conflict-free, with no child or slave-labor used in any part of the sourcing. However, at the current time, there are GMOs (Genetically Modified Organism) within the cookies, but no PHOs (Partially Hydrogenated Oils).

Based on popular demand gluten-free options for cookies will also be available, as well as vegan cookies. And if you can’t buy the cookies, or want to try your hand at baking them, recipes for almost all the cookies are available on the Girl Scouts website (girlscouts.org).

It feels like whenever the Girl Scouts start to sell cookies it becomes the talk of the town, and for good reason. Most people you ask about Girl Scout cookies absolutely love them, so I went to the students of Alliance high school to get their opinions.

Based on a poll including 95 high school students ranging from freshman to senior classes, there were a lot of different ideas.

The first question I asked was: What’s the best kind of cookie? I then listed the most popular girl scout cookies on the market (Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Patties, Thanks-a-Lot, Lemonades, S’mores, Caramel Delites, and other) Of these seven options, three were almost tied for the top cookie. Peanut Butter Patties barely made the top by taking 28.4% of the votes. Next up was Thin Mints with 25.3% and finally, Caramel Delites with 22.1% of the votes. With those three cookies taking up 75.8% of the votes, the other four options only took 24.2% of the votes.

The second question asked was “Are Girl Scout Cookies Overrated or Underrated?” Of the options “yes,” “no,” and “I really don’t care,” the option “Underrated” came out on top with 45.7% of the votes. The runner-up was “I don’t really care,” with 39.4% of the votes, and the lowest amount of votes was on the option “Overrated,” with 14.9%.

The last question I asked was “Are you, or have you ever been a Girl Scout?” In this question I included “yes” (23.2%), “no” (41.1%), and “I am of the male gender”(35.8%). I included the last answer just to make the outcome more accurate.

So through these questions and research, I got a lot of answers. Girl Scout cookies are a very big deal to a lot of people, especially in our town, and make the scouts a lot of money. There’s also much more history to the cookies than you would think, as well as a growing range of diverse options. In the future, Girl Scout cookies will most likely stay at their same point of popularity, if not grow in it.