It's Girl Scout cookie season across the Tri-State, but your favorite snack may be harder to find this year. Girl Scouts of Western Ohio (GSWO) switched bakeries this year and is offering a different lineup of tasty sweets. Instead of going to Kentucky, you may need to find a scout in Columbus, Ohio, or Richmond, Ind., to get your fix.
Two bakeries have contracts to make official Girl Scout cookies and councils can choose either of them. Each bakery — Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Bakers — makes the standard lineup, but can offer three additional cookies of their choosing. That means different cookies can be found in different parts of the country.
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For the past 12 years, Girl Scouts of Western Ohio has contracted with Little Brownie and Girl Scouts of Kentucky's Wilderness Road has worked with ABC Bakers. If you wanted a particular cookie, you just needed to find a scout from either Ohio or Kentucky.
With GSWO switching to ABC Bakers, scouts on both sides of the river are now selling the same line-up. The nine options are:
| Lemonades® | Thin Mints® | Peanut Butter Sandwich |
| Adventurefuls™ | Caramel deLites® | Trefoils® |
| Toast-Yay!™ | Peanut Butter Patties | Caramel Chocolate Chip |
Savvy cookie eaters will note some cookies are the same but have different names this year — Tagalongs are now Peanut Butter Patties under the new baker. New to Ohio troops are the Lemonades, Toast-Yay (a french toast-like flavor profile) and Caramel Chocolate Chip (gluten-free) cookies, and gone are the Girl Scout S'mores, Lemon-Ups, and Toffee-Tastic (gluten-free) cookies.
"If you want a S'mores cookie, you've got a couple of options," says Devon Beck-Monahan, director of product program for Girl Scouts of Western Ohio. "You can drive to our neighbors to the east and west of us — Girl Scouts of Ohio's Heartland and Girl Scouts of Central Indiana. Those are our bordering councils, and they are still with Little Brownie Bakers."
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Locally, scouts in Kentucky began selling in December. Scouts in southwest Ohio (and Dearborn and Ohio counties in Indiana) began selling Jan. 5, and scouts in central Indiana (including Wayne, Union, Franklin, Ripley and Switzerland counties) begin selling Jan. 8.
Girl Scout councils set their own cost for cookies. Proceeds are used to fund individual and troop activities, camps, and other council costs, activities and operations.
Local Ohio troops are selling for $6 this year. Local Kentucky troops remain at $5 per box.
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"With a new contract with the new baker, and with the inflation that we've been seeing across the country, we did make the decision to make that change," says Beck-Monahan. "At the same time, we are also able to give more money to our troops, too. Whenever we make those changes, we increase what we are providing to our troops so that they are also seeing the benefits of those changes."
What about those raspberry cookies?
Girl Scouts experimented with a new cookie last year, produced by both bakeries and offered exclusively online. Beck-Monahan says the Raspberry Rally cookies were a hit, but aren't back this year.
"It's the first time that we had something that was exclusively online, and the demand for them was huge; it was great. But this year, we've decided to take a little bit of a pause with the online-only avenues and reevaluate. They may be back in the future, but for this year, there is no Raspberry Rally."
The decision was made at the national level by Girl Scouts of the USA.
