Girls Scouts of Western Ohio is asking businesses to help them unload excess cookie stock from local troops. The annual sale season was cut short by several weeks, leaving roughly 300,000 packages of cookies unsold.
"We want to put our girls' health and safety at the forefront, and when we made that difficult decision (to cut the cookie season short), it unfortunately meant that a lot of our troops lost an average of $900 in sales, which supports their adventures for a whole year," says Devon Beck-Monahan, product sales team leader.
The council has about 2,000 troops that participate in the cookie program, representing 20,000 scouts. It's launching "Business Bosses Supporting Cookie Bosses" to help troops recoup lost sales by asking businesses to purchase the remaining cookie stock.
"They can obviously eat them themselves," Beck-Monahan says. "They can share them with clients and customers or use them as employee incentives throughout the year. They can share with other partners of their own."
The council is also pushing the idea of a "socially distant cookie booth."
"They can purchase (the cookies) from the troop and then represent the troop ... by putting the cookies out so customers can purchase them from those businesses."
The council can provide some signage and other materials for a business to display in order to keep the troops engaged and represented. Businesses looking to participate are asked to purchase at least four cases ($250). Troops with excess product can sign up here.
The council will take care of matching troops with businesses, the two can then arrange a way to safely get the product from one place to another.
Girl Scouts of Kentucky's Wilderness Road Council are also flush with surplus cookies - roughly 8,000 cases or 96,000 boxes.
"We are following the lead of our local Girl Scout Troops who proposed the idea to businesses and corporate partners to purchase cookies from Girl Scouts," says Haleigh McGraw, communications and brand director. "They are encouraging businesses to purchase these cookies and use them to say thank you to prospects, clients, or customers, donate to another community partner like a food bank, school, hospital, or other critical workers during this time and more."
Both councils say the cookies can also be donated to local first responders, doctors, nurses and military and critical care workers.
