It was 4 a.m. on a recent Saturday when the first volunteers arrived at the Tidewater Community College campus in Virginia Beach to begin unloading pallets of Girl Scout cookies from moving trucks.
By 7 a.m., others arrived to begin ripping the boxes of Thin Mints and Do-si-dos out of shrink wrap and placing them into more manageable stacks in four drive-thru lanes. It’s like a game of Jenga, some volunteers joked.
It was the annual Cookie Count ‘n’ Go distribution, the logistical feat held in Virginia Beach, Suffolk and Hampton to get tens of thousands of cookies to local troops for delivery or sale at a booth.
“Our goal is to sell 1,155,000 boxes of cookies, and that puts that plus back in the community right here at Hampton Roads,” said Tracy Keller, CEO of Girl Scouts of the Colonial Coast.
The Girl Scouts cookie program is a fundraiser that supports troops’ scouting experience. Girls keep a portion of the proceeds to pay for camps, trips and many reinvest it where they live, Keller said.
“A lot of the cookie money goes right back into the community through service projects,” she said. “So you see a lot of community gardens. We have a lot of support for our fur pals … so they'll go and support shelters. A lot of them also are supporting organizations that serve folks who are unhoused and making meals and delivering them and bringing coats and blankets and that sort of thing.”
First, though, the cookies have to make it to the customer and that process starts at distribution day.
The Colonial Coast Council used to get all of its cookie supply delivered to a central location, like a church. Then, troop leaders could come and pick up what they needed one at a time.
It took an entire weekend, Keller said.
The drive-thru distribution system is about 10 years old and wraps up in about five hours on a single Saturday. The multiple locations also make it easier for troops throughout the region, which covers southeastern Virginia and down to Hyde County, North Carolina. North Carolina-based troops still use a pared-down version of the old system to serve those who can’t make it into Virginia on Count ‘n’ Go day.
They arrive in minivans with second and third row seats folded down, pickup trucks with empty beds and some even with U-Hauls.
Jessica Laboy has been a Girl Scout troop leader for 11 years. She arrived at the Cookie Count ‘n’ Go in Virginia Beach, sitting in the back of her minivan with the trunk open, poised to hop out at each cookie station and help count and stack the boxes.
As she inched down the line, she crossed off each flavor on a sheet of paper, double-checking to make sure the boxes taking up her vehicle matched what she tabulated her troop would need before arriving.
“(We) figured it out the first couple of years and fine-tuned it over the years … probably two, three years,” Laboy said.
Kaitlyn Salway is a junior at Salem High School in Virginia Beach and has been a Girl Scout for 12 years. She used her experience to be a line leader at a drive-thru lane, directing her dad and other volunteers as troop representatives came to receive their boxes of baked goods for the season.
A troop leader hands Kaitlyn a bubble sheet: A page of nine color-coded boxes that correspond to cookie flavors, with large numbers in white bubbles in the middle, which tell volunteers how many boxes of cookies to prepare to load into a vehicle.
Last year, Kaitlyn sold about 1,100 boxes of cookies. It helped pay for her first international trip to Europe with about 40 other Girl Scouts.
“That was the first time I've left the country ever and it was definitely eye-opening,” she said. “We got to go to Ireland, Scotland, England and France, for 13 days. … It was definitely fast-moving, and very busy, but it was definitely worth it.”
Kaitlyn joined Girl Scouts at her mom’s suggestion.
“I was really shy growing up, and I didn't really talk to people, so my mom was like, ‘Let's put her into something that will hopefully get her out of her shell,’ and that definitely did help and grew my confidence.”
When she started selling cookies in kindergarten, Kaitlyn rarely spoke to customers at cookie booths. She said she always made sure to smile and she handled the task of handing the product to the customer, but it wasn’t until second or third grade that Kaitlyn said she realized “you kind of have to talk to the customer to get sales.”
Talking to people is no problem for Kaitlyn now. She strode up and down her drive-thru lane with bubble sheets, making sure each cookie station had enough boxes pulled from the towering pallets for the incoming troop leader. Once she did that, she went up and down the line again to lift the boxes into vans and U-Hauls alongside others.
Girl Scouts note the impact of their programs on the sides of cookie boxes: Selling cookies helps with goal-setting, decision-making, money management, business ethics and people skills.
Those skills come in handy when making recommendations to customers. Thin Mints and Samoas are by far the most popular flavors in Hampton Roads, but Girl Scouts learn about all cookies to make more sales.
CEO Keller prefers Tagalongs (“They have a nice crunch in them, nice creamy peanut butter and it's got the chocolate, so it's everything you need.”), while Kaitlyn recommends Thin Mints right out of the freezer.
But for people who don’t like mint and chocolate, she said the newest cookie flavor is worth a try.
“The Explorermores … we just got to try them as a troop and they're like Oreos with like a little bit of an almondy marshmallow,” she said. “They're really, really good.”
