Girl Scouts Finally Made a Cookie Without the Top 9 Allergens.

Remember when cookie season left one kid out?

Every February, the cookie boxes showed up on office desks and classroom tables. You picked your favorite while the kid with a peanut, milk or wheat allergy waited for someone to check the label. Sometimes their treat was the snack they brought from home.

What actually happened

Girl Scouts of the USA announced Girl Scout Sparkables on Sept 8, 2026, calling it its first allergy-friendly cookie. It arrives for the 2027 Girl Scout Cookie season, which opens nationally Jan 12, 2027, though some local councils start sooner. You order online through Digital Cookie, using a Scout’s or troop’s link or girlscoutcookies.org, for direct nationwide shipping. Local councils set the price.

The cookie comes from a partnership with Partake Foods. Think crunchy oatmeal, chocolate chips and colorful sprinkles, in a pink 5.5-ounce box with about 15 cookies. Partake’s nutrition panel lists five servings of three cookies, with 140 calories, 8 grams of sugar and 1 gram of protein per serving.

GSUSA says Sparkables are gluten-free and vegan, formulated without wheat, peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, milk, sesame, soy, fish and crustacean shellfish. They are made in a facility designed to avoid all nine, which does not process other products containing those allergens.

For Denise Woodard, this is a particularly good full-circle moment. The former Girl Scout and troop leader started Partake in 2016 after her daughter Vivienne was diagnosed with multiple food allergies. Finding a packaged snack her daughter could share was not a simple grocery run, so Woodard started building her own answer.

Partake’s own timeline tells the scrappy part: Woodard left her corporate job in 2017 and sold cookies from her car to New York City grocers. Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners led the seed round in 2019, and Rihanna joined the backers in the 2021 Series A. Today, Partake says its products reach more than 11,000 stores nationwide. Sparkables takes her back to the organization she grew up in, with Vivienne now a Girl Scout herself.

“It’s just been bringing tears to my eyes,” Woodard told TODAY about hearing from Girl Scouts happy they would be able to eat the cookies they sell.

It's just been bringing tears to my eyes.The WellWham perspective

Our read: belonging should not require a separate snack

This is our take. Cookie season is not really about whether we need another chocolate-chip cookie. It is about the familiar box everyone opens together, and the kid who usually has to say no. Woodard went from selling out of her car to making a cookie for the institution she grew up in. That is a better founder story than a famous investor’s name on a press announcement.

The reality check

You won’t find Sparkables on the cookie booth table outside the grocery store or in Partake’s regular supermarket aisle, because this box is online-only through Digital Cookie, with shipping. Council participation and box prices vary, so check your local link. Allergy-friendly still means a real cookie: three have 8 grams of sugar, including 7 grams added. Always check the final box label for your household’s needs.

The close

The classroom cookie pile used to come with a quiet no for some kids. This season, there is a pink box worth making room for.

Sources

Disclosure: WellWham has no affiliate links in this story.