Americans Eat About 300 Cookies A Year, Or 35,000 Cookies In A Lifetime

National Homemade Cookies Day is observed annually on October 1. If you are looking for an excuse to bake some homemade cookies, look no further. Package them up and share them with neighbors, co-workers, and friends!

• The first commercial cookie in the U.S. was the Animal Cracker, introduced in 1902.
• Oreo, the best-selling cookie of the 20th century, was developed and introduced by Nabisco, in 1912.
• The U.S. leads the world as the biggest cookie bakers and eaters, spending more than $550 million annually on Oreos alone.
• The Girl Scouts first began selling cookies In the 1920s.
• In 1989, New Mexico named the ‘bizcochito’ its official state cookie. Bizcochito, derived from the spanish word ‘bizcocho’ which means biscuit, is a delicious shortbread cookie flavored with anise and topped with cinnamon sugar.
• The National Cookie Cutter Historical Museum is located within the Joplin Museum Complex in Joplin, Missouri.
• The official state cookie of both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania is the chocolate chip cookie.
• Early American tinsmiths began making cookie cutters by hand back in the 1700s.
• Christmas cookies date back to Medieval Europe.
• American cookie jars evolved from British biscuit jars and first appeared on the scene during the Depression in the 1930s when housewives began making more cookies at home, rather than buying them at the bakery, and needed containers for them.
• Americans consume over 2 billion cookies a year … about 300 cookies for each person.
• The average American eats 35,000 cookies in a lifetime.
• 95.2 percent of U.S. households consume cookies.
• Half the cookies baked in American homes each year are chocolate chip.
• Santa Claus eats an estimated 336,150,386 cookies on Christmas Eve.
• Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) is credited with overseeing the first biscuits cut into the shape of men from ginger dough, the precursor to today’s gingerbread men.
• The earliest cookies are thought to date back to 7th century AD Persia (now Iran), shortly after the use of sugar became relatively common in the region.
• One of the most popular early cookies, which traveled especially well and became known on every continent by similar names, was the jumble, a relatively hard cookie made largely from nuts, sweetener, and water.
• Cookies came to America through the Dutch in New Amsterdam in the late 1620s. The name cookie is derived from the Dutch word koekje, meaning “small or little cake.” The earliest reference to cookies in America is in 1703, when “The Dutch in New York provided…’in 1703…at a funeral 800 cookies…’”
• The chocolate chip cookie was invented by the American chef Ruth Graves Wakefield and chef Sue Brides in 1938. One day while making cookies, she realized she was out of an ingredient for the recipe she was using. She had run out of baker’s chocolate, so she substituted it with a semisweet chocolate bar from Nestle. However, unlike the baker’s chocolate, the chopped up chocolate bar did not melt and mix into the batter like Ruth thought it would. The small pieces of chocolate only softened and the chocolate chip cookie was born.
• The Fortune cookie is actually an American invention originating in California.

Sources:

National Day Calendar

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Just Fun Facts