Girl Scout cookies available for delivery from Grubhub

For the first time, the Girl Scouts will partner with food delivery service Grubhub to deliver its beloved cookies that its members sell annually to support youth programs and activities.

The partnership will allow the Girl Scouts to safely sell cookies during the pandemic through contact-free pickup and delivery.

Those who wish to sample the cookies and support the organization, but don’t personally know a Girl Scout, can also order the cookies online beginning February 1, the organization said in a press release Tuesday.

“We’re proud of the resourceful ways Girl Scouts are running their cookie businesses safely and using their earnings to make the world a better place,” interim GSUSA CEO Judith Batty said in a statement this week.

Pandemic-related restrictions on in-person cookie sales have helped the girls develop their entrepreneurial skills. They’ve had to “use innovative sales tactics, and pivot to new ways of doing business when things don’t go according to plan,” Batty added.

Grubhub will offer pickup or delivery of the cookies in select cities from an expanding list of states including Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas.

E-commerce skills

It’s an experiment in e-commerce, too, for troop members as young as five, who will learn how to manage inventory, and track and fulfill orders using Grubhub’s back-end technology — just like many small-business owners new to online platforms have had to learn to do during the pandemic.

Grubhub, often slammed by restaurants for charging them too high a fee to serve customers, is waiving all of its fees for the Girl Scouts so that the organization will get 100% of proceeds from its cookie sales, according to the announcement.

“GSUSA is grateful to Grubhub for waiving all fees for the organization to make this new delivery option feasible for sales without reducing troops’ and councils’ proceeds,” the organization said in a press release.

The Girl Scouts sell roughly 200 million packages of cookies — nearly $800 million worth — during each cookie season.

Online ordering through Grubhub and the Girl Scouts’ Digital Cookie Platform begins February 1.

To find out if Grubhub will be delivering Girl Scout cookies in your area, you can enter your zip code on a special page of its website. To find contact-free cookie booths  in your area visit www.girlscoutcookies.org or text COOKIES to 59618 (message and data rates may apply), or download the official Girl Scout Cookie Finder app.