Cookie Dough
Girl Scout Cookie season runs from January to April. During that time, some scouts sell dozens of boxes of cookies. Some sell hundreds. Fourteen-year-old Olive sells more. One year, she sold nearly 13,000 boxes.
Olive is one of four Girl Scouts featured in Cookie Queens. It’s a new documentary. It hit theaters on August 7. The movie follows Olive, Ara, Nikki, and Shannon Elizabeth through a busy Girl Scout Cookie season.
All Business
Girl Scout Cookies are tasty. They’re also serious business. Nearly 700,000 Girl Scouts participate in a cookie season. They sell about 200 million boxes each year. The Girls Scouts of the U.S.A. calls cookie season “the largest girl-led entrepreneurial entrepreneurial related to starting or running a business (adjective) program in the world.”
Alysa Nahmias directed Cookie Queens. She told TIME for Kids that, at first, she had assumed Girl Scouts were “just practicing” business skills. She quickly realized her mistake: “No, they’re actually doing big business.”
Beyond the Cookie
Cookie Queens shows how hard the girls work. They make sales calls and handle money. They even learn to upsell upsell to try to persuade a customer to buy more (verb) customers. It’s fun, Olive says. But it can also be a lot of pressure.
At the end of the movie, Olive decides to set lower cookie goals in the future. She wants to spend time learning sign language and hanging with her friend and fellow scout Celia. “Perfectionism is something I’m still learning how to grapple with,” Olive told TIME for Kids. “I remind myself that I’m not what I achieve. I’m me.”







