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Writer's pictureTommy Sangchompuphen

Samoas are, in fact, Caramel-ly DeLite-ful


It's that time of year. Just as we're beginning to work on those New Year's Resolutions of exercising more and eating healthier, the Girl Scouts are doing their best to make sure we fail.

Yep, the Girl Scouts begin selling their cookies this week. Thin Mints. S'mores. Trefoils. Samoas ... no, wait .. aren't they Caramel DeLites?

If you're confused as to what to call those coconut-, caramel-, and chocolate-covered vanilla cookies, you're not alone. The confusion is widespread, even leading to the #Cookiegate2015 hashtag on Twitter a couple of years ago.

To help add some clarity to this issue, I have copied below a fun piece of writing that I penned nearly 13 years ago for a small town newspaper in Minnesota.

Now, you might ask: What does this have to do with law school or the bar exam.

It doesn't. It has absolutely nothing to do with law school or the bar exam. So, just enjoy the writing. Just like you will enjoy the boxes of cookies you will inevitably order and later devour.

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By Tommy Sangchompuphen (courtesy Hastings Star-Gazette, March 11, 2004)

If you’re a cookie connoisseur like I am, February is a wonderfully satisfying time of year.

It’s the season of Girl Scout cookies. Oh, how I love them.

For years—egad, my growing waistline probably implies decades—they have been a staple of my seasonal diet.

But because these scrumptious cookies are only available once a year, I stock up on the cookies, typically gauging the number of boxes I buy by predicting how much room I’ll have in the freezer.

I’m a cookie traditionalist and prefer Thin Mints and Caramel DeLites, which puts me in the majority of Americans, since these two varieties are the top-selling Girl Scout cookies. I can easily buy grocery bags full of boxed cookies, although it’s sometimes a challenge to have them last until the start of summer.

But I didn’t get a chance to pre-order my cookies this year. Nobody came knocking on my door. There wasn’t even an order form tacked on the bulletin board where I work.

No, this year I had to seek out the cookies myself.

Which didn’t seem like an unusual task until a Girl Scout didn’t quite understand what I wanted.

“I’ll take five boxes of Caramel DeLites, three boxes of Thin Mints, and a couple boxes ...” I tried to finish my sentence but was abruptly interrupted.

“Say that again,” she muttered, giving me a stare as if I were a complete novice to the cookie-buying experience.

“Five boxes,” I repeated.

“But of what?” she asked.

“Caramel DeLites”

“Um, we don’t have those.” She looked disappointed as the thought of losing a sale was imminent.

I looked at her order form, and there it was: the Caramel DeLite, the vanilla cookie, coated with caramel and sprinkled with toasted coconut and laced with stripes of delicious chocolate.

But, on this order form, my world had been turned upside down. These cookies weren’t Caramel DeLites. They were called Samoas.

Now, I’m familiar with Samoas, but I hadn’t seen a box of Samoas in years. In fact, I remember long ago asking for Samoas but being told they’re called Caramel DeLites. Hence, learning my lesson, I asked the Hastings troop member for boxes of Caramel DeLites. Surely, she would know what I was wanting.

But she didn’t, and being reminded by her that they were Samoas - not Caramel DeLites - put me in some sort of weird time warp.

Well, are they Samoas or Caramel DeLites? What’s going on here? Did they go back to being called Samoas?

Did the marketing people decide that the new name just didn’t capture the delightfully caramelly taste of the cookie as, uh, the group of Polynesian islands in the South Pacific did?

So what’s going on here?

Unbeknownst to many, the Girl Scouts grants licenses to two different bakeries that make the 200 million-plus boxes of cookies sold nationwide each year. Each of the nation’s 315 local Scout councils then decides from which baker to buy, said Marion Swan, spokesperson for Girl Scouts of the USA at its New York headquarters.

Each baker may name its own cookies, although they are required to offer three standard issues: a peanut butter/oatmeal variety (called either Do-si-Do or the more generic name, Peanut Butter Sandwich), a shortbread (otherwise known as the Trefoil or the Classic Shortbread Cookie), and a peppermint cookie (called Thin Mints, regardless of the baker who bakes them).

My favorite, the Samoa/Caramel DeLite, has proven so popular that both bakeries offer them, although in slightly different fashion. The Caramel DeLite is hexagonal, for example, while its cookie cousin, the Samoa, is circular. I guess they never last long enough in my hands for me to make that distinction.

Here lies the cookie confusion.

Each local council - there are seven of them in Minnesota - decides from which bakery to get its cookies, said Leticia Gonzales of the Girl Scout Council of Greater Minneapolis.

The Girl Scout Council of St. Croix Valley, which includes the Hastings service unit, gets its cookies from Little Brownie Bakers in Louisville, Ky. This means that, in Hastings and the other areas served by St. Croix Valley council, you’ll find Samoas -- but not Caramel DeLites. A total of four Minnesota councils get their cookies from Little Brownie Bakers; the other three get them from ABC Bakers of Richmond, Va., which means they have Caramel DeLites -- but not Samoas.

So when you live and work in different parts of the state, the name game becomes harder to predict.

In Minneapolis, they’re called Caramel DeLites. But right across the Mississippi River, they’re called Samoas. But if you work in Hastings and bring Samoas to friends in Minneapolis, those friends might think that you’re just being overly nostalgic and holding onto old, rotten cookies that hadn’t been available for sale in years.

Oh, well. That just leaves Samoa cookies for me.

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