🔒Smart cookies: Girl Scouts learn the biz on Waterville’s retail strip

On your marks, get set … it’s time to guess the cookie! That’s the name of the game this Saturday inside Incense & Peppermints, a Waterville candy store bursting with sweets and scented candles. Today it’s serving as a makeshift classroom for a dozen Girl Scout troops. The rapid-fire quiz challenges participants to name the Girl Scout Cookie based on clues about its taste, texture, color, aroma and appearance. Nine varieties are in this year’s lineup, from the perennial best-selling Thin Mints to the brand-new Exploremores, to help the entrepreneurs-in-training raise funds for local troop activities and community projects. “We’re going to use those five senses to describe each cookie, and you guys are going to try and use the clues to make hypotheses and figure out what those cookies are. Make sense?” parent volunteer Megan Boone asks six Girl Scout Cadettes from Troop 1353. Assisted by a store employee introduced to the middle schoolers as “Peppermint Patty,” the emcee goes into “Jeopardy”-host mode to start the round. All afternoon long, Boone will repeat the exercise several times for the Cookie Rally to prepare novices and experienced sellers alike and get them fired up for the two-month selling season that starts the next day. Similar events are held across the country. For Waterville’s version in late February, 119 Girl Scouts from kindergarten through high school swarm across the central Maine town’s retail strip on an unusually mild day in the 40s, wearing activity cards around their necks attached to orange lanyards that read “Brave. Fierce. Fun.” While some don uniforms decorated with service pins and patches, others are in street attire for workshops at 10 local businesses covering skills from safety to goal setting. First up in the cookie guessing game is a mystery treat described as having a soft crunch when you break it, with a deep aroma and chewy on the inside. Some of the girls correctly guess Adventurefuls, a brownie-inspired delicacy the emcee notes is only a few years old. “Yeah, but I still memorize cookies,” Amelia Wolfe declares before tackling the next round. The game was also a hit with fellow troop member Natalie Weiss-Mayhew, who says, “I felt like I was kind of an expert before. I’ve been in Girl Scouts for a while.” Today’s Cookie Rally isn’t just about fun and games, it’s about rallying the troops ahead of their biggest annual fundraiser. Nationwide, about 200 million boxes of cookies are sold every year, continuing a tradition that started in 1917 when the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Okla., baked and sold cookies for a high school cafeteria service project. Today, the cookies are produced at two commercial bakeries — Maine’s 400 troops get theirs from ABC Bakers’ production site in South Dakota. Out of 3,900 Girl Scouts in Maine, around 3,700 are registered to sell cookies. On average, each vends around 200 boxes a year. While numbers can vary, Maine Girl Scouts have sold 900,000 to a million boxes annually in seven of the last 10 years. Pre-season rallies have long been part of the tradition. “We try to get together the weekend before to really remind the girls how to set goals, how to talk to customers, how to build their marketing skills and have a successful cookie season,” Molly Bickford, a leader of Troop 1353 and Girl Scout mom who manages a dance studio in Fairfield, says before assembling her group of six inside the Chase Forum building on Main Street. She designed the poster and flip cards for “Guess the Cookie.” But today’s first stop is Day’s Jewelers for a goal-setting workshop, where girls pair up to choose activities of interest — then do the math to figure out how many packages of cookies they’ll need to sell to finance those activities, penciling in sums on provided worksheets.

A few doors down, they brainstorm about risk management at Holy Cannoli before heading to Smitty’s Book Cellar to decorate their sellers’ badges with tiny images of each cookie variety. On the back, they fill in a chart with prices of how much to charge, from a single box for $6 through a dozen for $72 — more math that’s good to get out of the way before selling starts. That is done door-to-door and at booths as well as online, to teach skills from money management to business ethics.

Outside the bookstore, Alli Ward says she was glad to spend a few minutes browsing inside after completing her lanyard while Addy Sinclair says she liked the activity because “I’m a crafty person.” Before the girls head to the Pink Crow Collective gift shop to sample some of what they’ll soon be selling, Sinclair says, “I just want to beat my goals from last year.” When we checked back in — 10 days into the two-month selling season — the troop had already achieved more than half of this year’s target.