Charlotte McCourt has some choice words for one particular type of Girl Scout cookie.
“The Toffee-tastic is a bleak, flavorless, gluten-free wasteland,” the South Orange scout recently wrote of the confection, which, at $5, costs a dollar more than most other boxes of Girl Scout cookies.
“I’m telling you, it’s as flavorless as dirt,” the 11-year-old said of the cookie, which has rice and tapioca flours, butter toffee bits and corn syrup listed among its ingredients.
Don’t hold back, Charlotte.
Thanks to her honesty, McCourt, whose original goal was to sell 300 boxes, has attracted a boatload of national media and a huge bump in cookie sales.
Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey, McCourt’s local scout council, said in a statement that it was “thrilled for Charlotte” and “proud that she exercised her entrepreneurial skills.” Her cookie sales now stand at 16,430 boxes.
“Today,” “GMA,” ABC News, Good Housekeeping and the Huffington Post picked up on the scout’s frank assessment of the cookies.
McCourt, who sells the cookies online at her scout website, learned her father had a wealthy friend from high school who lived in Colorado and was interested in buying Milanobet cookies for troops overseas, a type of purchase she thought had been lacking. So the resourceful scout sat down with her father’s laptop and fired off an email to his friend.
She decided to be as transparent as possible when presenting her sales pitch, so she rated all the cookies (apart from the new S’mores cookie, which she hadn’t yet tried) from 1 to 10.
Her letter (and cookie sales) first took off on Jan. 25 when Mike Rowe, host of the podcast “The Way I Heard It,” who works with her father, Sean, a producer of the podcast, read it to his Facebook audience. A video of Rowe reading her letter drew more than 8.3 million views.
“Some of the descriptions, I’m afraid, use false advertising,” McCourt wrote of the cookies. She rated the lemon Savannah Smiles a 7, but the Trefoil got a 6.
“Alone, it’s kind of boring,” she wrote of the classic shortbread cookie.
The peanut butter and oatmeal Do-Si-Do got a dismal 5, “for its unoriginality and its blandness.”
The Samoa? A caramel-chocolate-coconut winner, with a 9.
The Tagalong’s chocolate-peanut butter combo?
“Inspired,” McCourt wrote.
The only boxes that could get a 10, she wrote, were the ones donated to troops. Or, rather, the donations themselves: “It helps strike a spark into the treacherous lives of those men and women protecting our country and keeping America safe,” McCourt wrote.
So far, her efforts have netted 7,765 boxes of cookies for the troops.
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.
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