Is Crumbl falling apart? Yes, it is

Perhaps by now you have seen, somewhere on social media, a drink made by Crumbl that half the internet seems convinced could be a biohazard.

Called the Crazy Cousins, it mixes a base like Sprite or Mountain Dew with a full can of Red Bull, strawberry purée, pineapple syrup, and a serious glug of coconut milk. The 32-ounce version delivers 186 grams of slurpable sugar.

“Almost half a pound of sugar, or five cans of Coke” is how Itay Shechter, a wellness influencer with more than a million followers, explained it in a post that went viral. “I had to stop everything and go make that video,” Shechter told me last week. “My job is making a number like that impossible to scroll past.”

Physician Mark Hyman declared it “the equivalent of eating 19 Krispy Kreme donuts” and said it “should be illegal.” Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer joked that he’d stir in Ketel One. The betting app Polymarket got creative—“JUST IN: Crumbl cookie company releases drink with 186,000mg of sugar,” making it sound even more like a toxic threat.

A drink containing nearly four times the recommended daily limit of sugar might seem like reaching rock bottom for Crumbl. But in the eight-year-old Utah company’s push beyond cookies into the colorful parade of turbocharged sweets it’s rolled out lately, betting that it can’t go any lower may be premature.

Somewhere between the following drops . . .

• “cookie fries”

• nostalgia-bait mashups loaded with Reese’s, Oreos, or Pop-Tarts

• Kim, Kourtney, and Kylie’s full-menu takeover

• dirt cups with gummy worms

• layered icebox cakes

• mousse-topped skillet cookies

• Jimmy Fallon’s 1,200-calorie Holiday Seasoning Candy Cane Brownie

• protein balls

• the rollout of 46 “dirty soda” flavors, all at once

. . . Crumbl lost the plot.

A growing backlash (fanned by even Zooey Deschanel) coupled with weakening sales suggests that the formula that made Crumbl one of the fastest-growing sensations of the 2020s may be going as soft as the interiors of its sugar cookies.

Crumbl may become a business lesson in what happens when a company built for virality runs out of ways to top itself. Or, more uncomfortably, it may do the opposite, proving that a drink containing a half-pound of sugar is noteworthy not because it went too far, but because it didn’t go far enough.

In this deep dive into the Crumblverse, store employees reveal what the company’s really selling—and it’s not dessert. We explore how its more baroque offerings meant to lure customers back are playing a dangerous game; the unexplored weakness in Crumbl’s model that could sink the chain; what Crumbl has in common with Sweetgreen; what the company will look like in five years; and its true cultural legacy, which isn’t going anywhere.

“Somebody had to say it”

If McDonald’s is a real-estate company acting like a hamburger chain—as B.J. Novak’s character put it so well in The Founder, the 2016 biopic about Ray Kroc’s aggressive takeover of the fast-food empire—then Crumbl, to quote QSR Research Hub founder Justin Sellers, is “a viral content engine masquerading as a cookie brand.”

I observed the phenomenon up close as soon as I began researching this story, watching my social algorithms get overtaken. My feeds quickly served up a seemingly endless menu of posts by creators who, every week, dutifully roll out Crumbl unboxings, usually as they sit in their car. Each sweet treat waits its turn to get scored, and historically they’ve gotten high marks—an 8.5, a 9.2, a 9.8, a perfect 10 out of 10.

But lately, reviewers have been doling out an awful lot of 3s and 4s. In March, What Am I Eating? docuseries host Deschanel became the highest-profile example of what people are calling “de-influencing” when she savaged every cookie in a Crumbl box in a post that she captioned “Somebody had to say it.” (Cinnabon, Insomnia Cookies, Chip Cookies, Craig’s Cookies, Nothing Bundt Cakes, and Taylor Chip each materialized in the actress’s comments section, offering to send products she’d like more. Crumbl did too, writing: “Zooey, we’re huge fans of yours! We’ve released over 200 flavors and we’re sure we can get you something you’ll love.”)

Even the faithful are sounding more exhausted. Last week’s World Cup-themed drop included a mango Tajín cookie—a riff on the mangonada, in honor of Mexico—and the consensus among the brand’s most devoted reviewers was that it was strangely wet, smelled off, and tasted bad. CoverGirl makeup artist Charles James gave it “zero out of 10.” Baker Shelly Jaronsky, of the blog Cookies & Cups, all but dry-heaved into a napkin as she tried to articulate her thoughts: “Ghhk, uuungh—I don’t like it. Terrible. Actually bad.”

Then there are the outright antagonists. Some of them are oddly familiar to me, because they’re the same people I encountered while reporting a story in 2023 about the influencers attacking Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods for being too processed.

California paleo influencer Brendan Ruh is among those who’ve pivoted. His bit these days is standing outside Crumbl shops, where he warns customers that some of the ingredients are health hazards (the red dye No. 40 in the icing can “give you autism”), sometimes even paying them to chuck their telltale pink boxes in the trash. The stunt has annoyed cofounder Sawyer Hemsley enough to clap back on TikTok, telling fans: “If someone offers you money not to buy Crumbl . . . just take the money and order delivery.” Ruh doubled down. Last week, he pushed a wheelbarrow filled with strawberries into a Bay Area Crumbl store to demonstrate how much sugar was in one dirty soda. But it’s hard to imagine Hemsley was all that mad: Ruh’s videos over the months have generated millions of impressions for the dessert brand.

The company, for its part, has been keeping silent lately. Crumbl didn’t respond to my questions about how the business is faring, or my request to see the nutritional facts for its dirty sodas—which, as with a number of items on the constantly changing menu, aren’t disclosed on the website or app. In May, cofounders Jason McGowan and Hemsley announced that they were stepping back as chief executive officer and chief brand officer, respectively, to let Crumbl focus on its next stage of growth, saying that the company had become “something none of us could have imagined when we started”—a line that could be read either as humble gratitude or a quiet warning.

How the cookie business crumbles

Public opinion has been core to Crumbl’s business model since before the first shop opened, in 2017, outside Provo, Utah. McGowan told Good Morning America in 2021 about A/B-testing their way to “the world’s best chocolate chip cookie.” They’d change a single ingredient, take samples to a public place, and ask people which they preferred. (McGowan is still a bit miffed that testers picked milk chocolate chips over semisweet, his favorite.) Back then, their “whole business” revolved around perfecting this one singular cookie.

Things changed in 2021 after a “Strawberry Toaster Tart” cookie—a Pop-Tart in all but name, as Crumbl’s first brand partnership was still months away—blew up on TikTok. Today, Crumbl has amassed 10.8 million followers on the platform, plus 6.4 million on Instagram and 4.1 million on Facebook. Sales exploded too, vaulting Crumbl from $53 million in revenue in 2020 to $1 billion by 2022.

The corporate strategy was quickly rewritten to focus on new drops, selling the perception of endless novelty. “One week your favorite is front and center, the next it’s gone,” the website now tells customers. “That’s the fun of our rotating menu.”

That “fun” is being applied to the menu format itself. In January, the “biggest menu update in Crumbl’s history” cut weekly flavors from seven to four. A Classic Menu debuted. Thursdays became Thin Thursdays. Then those Cookie Thins moved to all-week availability. In late May, the simple original Milk Chocolate Chip Cookie became a more complicated Better Bake Chocolate Chip Cookie, adding semisweet chips to the recipe after all.

Then again, this is pretty much how the dessert business has always operated. Restaurant Business editor-in-chief Jonathan Maze has observed that it’s particularly “prone to fads.” Fro-yo, cupcakes, artisan doughnuts, croissant hybrids, extreme milkshakes, Dubai chocolate—each had its white-hot moment.

Even the old-standby cookie chains, which emerged in the 1970s, ended up struggling. Famous Amos, Mrs. Fields, and Great American Cookies stores became popular for their soft, fresh-baked cookies sold in food courts and airports. The economics seemed simple: Flour, sugar, butter, and eggs were cheap, and mixing them together required minimal training.

But the unit economics never really worked. A dollar per cookie left little margin and even less room for growth. Famous Amos’s quality slipped, and now it’s a vending machine brand owned by Italian candy giant Ferrero. Great American Cookies survived longer but wound up as a subsidiary of Mrs. Fields. Mrs. Fields itself, which grew to more than 700 locations in six years, tried to introduce brownies, muffins, and other baked goods when cookies weren’t generating enough income on their own. When shopping malls cratered during the 2010s retail apocalypse, Mrs. Fields’s business went with them. Having watched from the front row, a daughter of Debbi Fields—the real-life “Mrs.”—launched a new cookie brand earlier this month targeting wellness influencers with protein, brain-boost, and sleep-aid cookies.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha in the trade-down economy

McGowan and Hemsley’s decision to step down imminently, once Crumbl finds their replacements, adds to the mixed signals about the brand’s future. They snagged private equity money in May of 2025—a minority stake from TSG Consumer Partners alongside a $500 million financing package from Blackstone and Golub Capital. The deal valued Crumbl at $2 billion and was widely seen as an effort to professionalize the business by bringing in outsider capital and operators. (TSG is an investor in the fast-growing coffee chain Dutch Bros; among its earliest consumer brand investments was Famous Amos, in 1988, which TSG helped stabilize and run as a consumer packaged goods business.) Recently, Crumbl has also expanded into Australia, Mexico, and England, while also growing a savory pie concept called Crust Club that it acquired.

Yet Crumbl also appears to be hunkering down. Workers say that company executives recently warned them that sharing any corporate information externally could trigger legal action. It quietly removed net-profitability numbers from its most recent franchise disclosure documents, eliminating a key metric that franchise investors have used to evaluate system performance.

Crumbl also just settled a copyright dispute with Warner Music Group, which sued the company for $24 million over the unauthorized use of songs by artists including Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Lizzo, and Beyoncé in order to help its social media posts go viral.

Meanwhile, the public’s sweet tooth hasn’t abated, no matter how many people are using GLP-1s and protein-maxxing. Last year, analysts declared that the U.S. is in the midst of a “bakery boom.” Cult cupcake brand Magnolia says it’s on a record-setting expansion tear. Insomnia Cookies opened its 350th store last November during its fastest-growing quarter ever, claiming that it’s on pace to open 75 more locations this year. Even Cinnabon is growing.

New upstarts like PopUp Bagels are cultivating large online followings using a similar playbook of weekly cream cheese flavor drops and influencer collabs. Market conditions seem to favor the model: We’re in a trade-down economy in which Gen Z and Alpha are amassing purchasing power, and they’re swapping sit-down meals for delivery and snacks.

All of which makes Crumbl hard to dismiss—even if it turns stomachs. “I’ve been thinking about this drink from Crumbl all week,” the popular industry tracker Wolf of Franchises wrote about Crazy Cousins in early June. “The health outrage is free PR, although I wonder how this translates to revenue for franchisees.”

Among those who know the game best, there’s a grudging respect for how Crumbl plays it.

“The worse Crumbl is, the better for me—I like it for my own content reasons,” Shechter told me. “Crumbl uses the same mechanism that I use as a creator to build hype. The menu rotates, you never know what you’ll get, so you always have a reason to come back.”

The unbeatable price of free labor

Crumbl employees have learned that it helps to enjoy irony in the workplace. When I asked if the products had gotten more complicated to bake, every response was a version of: Have you seen our menu lately? (All of the employees who spoke to me requested anonymity, citing a nondisclosure agreement they signed.)

A New England store manager explained it this way: Crumbl is a purveyor of looks, not flavors. Recent cost-saving measures have centered on cheaper ingredients. Astute observers may have already noticed the same buttercream and mousse reappear on different cookie releases week after week. Last year, Businessweek reported that internal memos showed Crumbl switching to imitation vanilla and replacing real eggs with liquid eggs, instructing workers to “measure out of customer sight” when pouring from the bags. Yet entry-level employees are still expected to pipe on frosting like they’re at Dominique Ansel Bakery.

“Impossible to dress” has become employee slang for items so time-consuming to create—due to meticulous drizzles, crumbs, candies, or garnishes—that on particularly busy days, workers sometimes let the final presentation slide, hurting their Instagrammability factor. (They’ll be gone next week anyway.) Now you can appreciate why the quality of cookies in TikTok unboxings varies so much.

Crumbl’s performance still looks robust from the top down. Sales have grown each year, climbing to $1.3 billion by 2025—not too shabby. At its peak, the company was citing operating margins that were better than McDonald’s and reporting that its app had more activity than the Starbucks app. That inspired a flood of new entrepreneurs to take a leap of “faith,” as McGowan described it on a 2022 podcast episode with Wolf of Franchises. Many had “never run a business before” and “put mortgages on their homes” or “quit being doctors or dentists or lawyers” to become Crumbl franchisees.

But the economics tell a different story at the store level. According to Crumbl’s franchise disclosure documents, average store sales fell from $1.8 million in 2022 to $1.1 million in 2025. Median store net profit dropped to under $80,000—a modest return for a brand that’s lured franchisees with promises of exceptional growth. “That’s the real story,” QSR Research Hub’s Sellers said in a Crumbl franchising report. Not whether Crumbl survives,” but whether franchises can make good money under the model.

At the same time, Crumbl’s store count has shot up, from 55 in 2019 to 1,100 by 2025. This was as store sales were sprinting in the opposite direction. Both things were happening so fast that Kevin Schimpf, senior director of industry research at Technomic, said it’s essentially without industry precedent. He argues that the brand is “just so ubiquitous now” that it’s “lost a lot of the novelty and shine.”

Schimpf believes that the closest analog may be Sweetgreen, when the faltering salad chain made the mistake in 2025 of adding 14% more locations in the same year that its same-store sales slid by 8%. That misstep, for a company that had already gone a bit astray, led to a series of dramatic news headlines such as “Why investors are abandoning Sweetgreen,” “How Sweetgreen became millennial cringe,” and “Did Sweetgreen just hit rock bottom?”

Is Crumbl next? The cookie chain has also gone through layoffs (about 10% of its corporate workforce) and shuttered almost three dozen stores since 2023—a stark contrast to its first six years without a single closure.

But the company may simultaneously be buoyed by something that’s hard to quantify: thousands of content creators who fuel the hype cycle week after week, even when they’re disgusted.

Cornell University communication professor Brooke Erin Duffy, author of (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, calls these influencer posts “aspirational labor.” What makes Crumbl distinctive, she told me, is that it has hitched one of the most mass-marketed products imaginable (“cookies!”) to the social media trend cycle. Because algorithmic success doesn’t require a good product, it doesn’t really matter whether creators love or hate what they unbox each week—just that it’s memorable.

Emily Hund—a researcher with the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication whose book, The Influencer Industry, examines this dynamic—agrees. When I showed her posts of influencers spitting out the Tajín cookie, she said, “If people see enough creators reacting to this cookie, they might be curious enough to try it themselves and see just how bad it really is. Crumbl cashes in either way.” The question is how long that revenue logic holds.

When I ask Hund whether she thinks Crumbl will be around in 10 or even five years, she said, “I doubt it.” Then she immediately adds that “some other hype-based company will take its place.”

Duffy said the model will outlive any single brand: “I don’t see systems based on free labor disappearing anytime soon.”