Devin Acton and his family packed up a U-Haul about a year ago and drove about 2,000 miles from their Utah home to a Delaware apartment they’d never set foot in.
The reason? To help bring Crumbl Cookies to the First State. Behind a wave of social media hype, the national chain is making its way, like Acton, from Utah across the country, growing to more than 800 locations in just six years.
“It was a big jump, but it was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up,” Acton said.
Acton opened Delaware’s first Crumbl Cookies on Thursday in the Christiana Fashion Center. Four months earlier, he opened his first store in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, near Wegmans on Route 202. A third location is on the way, expected to open at the end of this year or the beginning of next year. Acton is finalizing a lease for a space on Kirkwood Highway by the BJs near Elsmere.
Crumbl Cookies features six cookies selected from a catalog of more than 270 recipes each week. The only mainstays are the chocolate chip cookie and a frosted cookie. The cookies are made from scratch daily.
This week’s flavors are red velvet cupcake, waffle, chocolate cookies and cream, fried ice cream, snickerdoodle cupcake, classic pink sugar and chocolate chip.
Social media reviews from customers have been a big part of the Logan, Utah, chain’s rapid growth. The company has combined that online attention with sleek pink packaging and the rotating menu to encourage routine visits.
The cookies don’t come cheap. A single cookie is $4.88. A four-pack box is $15.90 and a six-pack box is $24.48.
“It’s gourmet,” Acton said. “A single cookie is $4.88. For some people, that’s a huge chunk of money for a single cookie. They are big, but it’s fresh-baked, gourmet. We bring in the highest-quality ingredients.
“We’re not using the cheap chocolate chips. We’re buying the most expensive ones you can find.”
Delaware Online/The News Journal spoke with Acton as the Christiana store “soft opened” Thursday. He expects the store to sell 12,000 cookies throughout the weekend. Questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Question: There are probably more workers here than I would have expected. Can you walk through your general day from open to close?
Answer: We show up between 5 and 6 in the morning and we start prepping what we want to do for the day — trying to estimate how many cookies we’re going to sell and which ones might be more popular so we can prep more dough for those specific cookies. And then we just get going. The mixers — they’re big mixers — so they can easily mix 200 cookies at a time, it holds that much dough. It’s all balled by a team; we have tons of staff balling dough. We hold it only for a certain amount of time, so it’s not like we mix it all on Mondays and use that same dough. We do have timeframes to make sure that it’s fresh throughout the week. So that’s why we’re constantly mixing. Same thing with the ovens. It’s baked fresh. We hold it only for a few hours at a time. You’re not getting cookies that we baked at 6 a.m. at noon.
How many people do you have in total?
We hired about 70 and just about everyone is coming in so far. These next couple weeks we’ll have as many as 20-plus people here at a time, helping us do it all. It’s supposed to be like a fun, exciting brand. That’s why it’s the open kitchen so people know that everything is made fresh. That’s what we want.
What led you to get involved in the company?
Crumbl started in Utah. I’m from Utah. I have some business partners of mine who I worked for for a couple of years in some restaurants in Utah. I spent the time working for them, helping them manage their restaurants while I was in school, raising our family — we have three kids — and they came to us and said we want to do this and we need someone who can move out. Crumbl, it was saturated on the West Coast, so they couldn’t do anything near Utah or close to us. So we were like if we’re going to move, let’s go somewhere and this area was mostly untouched by Crumbl. We looked for family-oriented places. We love it; we love the area. We’ve really tried to get involved in the community and make this our home. Utah is where we were born and raised so all of our family is back there and all of our friends so it was a big jump, but it was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.
What is the region that you’re looking at?
We have the freedom to pick the areas. We kind of picked this area because there are a lot of people, a lot of families, fairly close to Philadelphia. We like that traffic coming back and forth. So we picked Wilmington, here and Glen Mills. We want to be close for our benefit so as we’re managing and running stores we’re not spread. We live in north Wilmington in the Brandywine area so I’m 15-20 minutes from each of my locations.
Do you think you’ll stay mostly in northern New Castle County? Do you think you’ll ever go any lower?
There’s another franchise owner opening one in Dover. Potentially we’ll look further south. I don’t think we’d ever go as far south as the beaches, us personally. We’ve talked about that, but the beach towns are different. We would like to do more in the area. This is an area that could support a few more stores. There’s nothing in Newark yet. I don’t know if it’s been claimed. We would like to stay more local here. It makes our lives more easy here in many ways.
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Contact Brandon Holveck at bholveck@delawareonline.com. Follow him on Twitter @holveck_brandon.
