It’s a fact of life that restaurants often overproduce and have food waste at the end of the night. Crumbl Cookies is no exception, and employees are often left with cookies they can’t serve the next day when closing up shop. An Instagram video posted by Amin Shaykho claimed that if you come in just before closing, Crumbl will give you some of these cookies for free. In the video, which received over 700,000 likes, Shaykho gets multiple boxes of cookies for free from the employees.
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, though, and this seems to be the case for late-night cookies as well. Multiple people in Shaykho’s comments stated that they called their local Crumbl locations and were told they do not give away leftover cookies. With Shaykho’s video going viral, even if some locations used to do this, they most likely will not anymore thanks to an influx of customers looking for free products. Instead, locations either donate the cookies or simply throw them out. A former Crumbl employee posted on a Reddit thread, “My store would try to limit how much we had at the end of the night, but then they would let employees take whatever they want of the leftovers and throw the rest away. It’s pretty much up to whatever employee’s are closing if they want to donate them or not.” However, even this policy varies, as an employee on another thread said they can be fired for taking leftover cookies.
Where are leftover cookies donated to (and can you get some)?
Since there is no official chain-wide policy for leftover cookies, where the donations go is usually up to employees. Multiple Crumbl employees on Reddit said their cookies are donated to a food bank, with one noting that their store gets a tax write-off for the donation. Since food banks are often not open when Crumbl closes (which is 10-11pm in the Cincinnati area,) they are usually kept and picked up the next day. If you want to support your local food bank, consider suggesting to management that your city’s Crumbl location make donations.
Another employee said their store would often offer leftover cookies to firefighters, police, and community centers. Some even offer them to employees closing at nearby stores, and a few did say they will personally give a free cookie to late-night customers — but certainly not the multiple boxes Shaykho received in his viral video.
While there’s no harm in going to Crumbl later at night and seeing if you get a free extra cookie with your purchase, know that many employees will be forbidden from handing out freebies by management, and don’t harass them if you’re told no. If you want to guarantee some free cookies, join Crumbl’s rewards program to start saving money on your purchases.
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