Thoughts on this week.
These are good ideas and creative choices.
The trouble Crumbl seems to be having now as they rapidly throw every idea they have at the wall in hopes of inspiring more sales is that they have crossed the rubicon in terms of their typical strategy of hoping novelty will just keep pulling people in.
It is pulling people in (me included this week!), but because these cookies aren’t going through testing, there are execution errors everywhere. Most of the discourse I see here and elsewhere on social media is about the texture of the different cookies. Most people seem to like the flavors but there is a lot of talk of like whether something should be crisp or chewy or why something is falling apart or is too thin or whatever. Some of these problems may be from refrigerated storage and how long they stay there. Feedback through the testing process could have mitigated a lot of this and it had people scratching their heads.
I will say that I found most of the flavors to be very good. Although, and I am sure others have realized this: the crème brûlée topping is basically cream cheese frosting torched with sugar. My daughter and I identified that tang immediately. It does not taste like crème brûlée to me at all, and it’s especially off when workers really aren’t trained how to properly sugar and use the torch. A true cracky shell would have allowed me to fool myself, but we had hardly any sugar shell. Nonetheless it’s a tasty cookie- but the base is just soft and crumbling, and not very appealing, despite the flavor being good.
The waffle cone pieces within the gelato were mostly stale and soft for us. The bigger ones added on top were the only crisp, but the overall impression was stale. We ended up throwing most of those out.
The flavor of the cannoli was delightful to both of us, but the texture was way off and not even close to cannoli. If they were going to do thins, they should have just leaned way into it, almost like a less sticky lace cookie, thin, crisp, maybe a little chewy just to give it a more “cookie” than straight cannoli shell. Nonetheless, this was our favorite cookie this week. It really wasn’t overly sweet and the flavor was really good. It was just weird to bite through it with no textural contrast whatsoever. It was all soft. But I would get it again.
We really liked the stroopwafel too, but while our top cookie was perfect and chewy, the bottom was more mushy and doughy. I don’t know if that was because of how and when the caramel is added and then how everything is stored, but the bottom cookie texture didn’t fit with the stroopwafel vibe. Also, our cookies were DEFINITELY snickerdoodles- anyone else? We didn’t care and thought the taste was excellent with the cinnamon, just surprised because we thought they were sugar cookies.
Overall, I like the direction of creative and tasty concoctions that Crumbl went in, but I really hope they remember that they have a number of excellent and creative cookies out there that have already been very well received by the public and that haven’t been seen in a long time- jammy heart, chocolate raspberry truffle, Banoffee pie, peanut butter pie cookie, strawberry pretzel pie, cowboy cookie, biscoff tres leches, etc. I hope we will see those return soon.