Americans Eat Over 2 Billion Cookies A Year – About 300 Cookies For Each Person.

Updated May 17, 2024

(December 17, 2019) Bake Cookies Day occurs in the middle of the holiday season, and is a great excuse to bake some delicious cookies to help you get through the cold, winter days! Why not try some cinnamon flavored cookies (such as the snickerdoodle) to get your kitchen smelling of winter festivities? Or there’s always the classic ‘sugar cookie’ with brightly colored royal icing, silver candy balls and sprinkles, cut into a myriad of seasonal shapes.
Bake Cookies Day is your excuse to indulge in the art (and eating) of cookies of every stripe and measure, especially those that remind you of the season.

• 7th Century – This was soon shortened to “cooky” or “cookie”, although cookies themselves seem to date back as far as 7th century Persia!
• 17th Century – Cookies arrived in America in the 17th century, although the word arrived much later with the Dutch in its original form of “koekje”, meaning “little cake”.
• 1902 – The first commercial cookie in the U.S. was the Animal Cracker, introduced in 1902.
• 1912 – The Oreo, the best-selling cookie of the 20th century, was developed and introduced by the American company Nabisco, in 1912.
• 1920s – The Girl Scouts first began selling cookies In the 1920s.
• 1921 – Baking icon Betty Crocker is created by the Washburn-Crosby milling company.
• 1938 – Chocolate-chip cookies are created by Ruth Graves Wakefield and Sue Brides.
• 1997 – The chocolate-chip cookie is declared as the official cookie for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
• 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.
• 2018 – Nabisco “uncaged” the animals on its Animal Crackers box cover after receiving criticism from PETA.
• The U.S. leads the world as the biggest cookie bakers and eaters, spending more than $550 million annually on Oreos alone.
• The U.S. has a National Cookie Cutter Historical Museum 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. Christmas cookies or Christmas biscuits are traditionally sugar cookies or biscuits (though other flavors may be used based on family traditions and individual preferences) cut into various shapes related to Christmas. Modern Christmas cookies can trace their history to recipes from Medieval Europe biscuits, when many modern ingredients such as cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, almonds and dried fruit were introduced into the west.
• 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.
• The chocolate chip cookie is America’s most popular cookie with 53% of Americans naming it the top gun. The peanut butter cookie (16%) and oatmeal cookie (15%) are second and third.
• Americans consume over 2 billion cookies a year – about 300 cookies for each person.
• The average American eats 35,000 cookies in a lifetime.
• The chocolate chip cookie was created by accident.
• The first chocolate chip cookie was the size of a quarter.
• The top 10 selling commercial cookies in the U.S. are:
  • Nabisco Oreo
  • Nabisco Chips Ahoy
  • Nabisco Oreo Double Stuff
  • Pepperidge Farm Milano
  • Private Label Chocolate Chip
  • Little Debbie Nutty Bar
  • Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream
  • Nabisco Chips Ahoy Chewy
  • Nabisco Nilla Vanilla Wafers
  • Private Label Sandwich Cookies
• The cookies that the Cookie Monster enjoys on Sesame Street are actually painted rice cakes.  
• Fortune cookies are not served in China. They are mostly an American phenomenon.
• Oreos are knock-offs of Hydrox biscuits, which predate Oreos by four years.  
• English women used to eat gingerbread “husbands” to improve their chances of finding a real mate. 
• Famous Amos cookies were born when the founder Wally Amos, an agent, began using them to recruit celebrities to his agency.
• There are eight basic types of cookies: bar cookies, drop cookies, fried cookies, molded cookies, no-bake cookies, refrigerator (ice box) cookies, rolled cookies and sandwich cookies.
• 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.

Sources:

Days of the Year

Mobile-Cuisine

Brownies

Epicurious

Buzz Feed

Just Fun Facts

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