It is staggering. Each year, Girl Scouts sells about 250 million boxes of cookies. For six weeks, cookie sales totaled nearly $800 million. Yet, for all the cookie sales, the Girl Scout cookie operation is more than a six-week endeavor. It’s more than a hobby or a side-hustle. It is a lifestyle, and it is all-consuming. In a cozy, yet informative documentary, filmmaker Alysa Nahmias takes us into a coming-of-age story in the making. In the film Cookie Queens, we enter a story that is less about Thin Mints and more about sisterhood, expectations, and ambition. Humorous and revealing, the film offers a behind-the-scenes look at the cookies we gobble up each year.

I never had a family member in the Girl Scouts. My deepest connection with the organization was and still is the purchasing of Samoas every January—a peripheral relationship and understanding of an organization that operates at a whirlwind pace each season. We have this idealistic, if not outright simplistic, notion of the organization being about cookies and sisterhood. And while that is the case, I found, through this documentary, that it is a real pressure operation. Young girls are fostering a sense of scale ambition and given a crash course in capitalism and commercialism all at once.

Smartly, Cookie Queens is unconcerned with the trivial matters of who sells the most cookies in a particular troop. Nor does it fester on the cookies themselves. The film follows four girls, ages five to twelve, and their families as they become marketers, salespeople, and entrepreneurs, all for the sake of selling cookies. But what does that say about us collectively? What does it say about these girls? The film answers these questions in a revealing light that goes beyond the badges and boxes.

One of the girls in the film is Olive, a twelve-year-old from North Carolina. She is the top seller of her troop. Wise beyond her years, she has her eyes set on becoming a Supreme Court Justice when she grows up. Now, for Olive, her cookie-selling is less a hobby and more of a full-time business. The entire family is all in on cookie season. A delivery of 12,000 boxes of cookies on 16-wheelers encapsulates how serious she is about selling cookies. It speaks to what began in a humble setting is now becoming a modus operandi for drive and ambition, all rolled into the Thin Mints package. 

Olive and her family represent a microcosm of the entire operation. It’s not enough to sell a few cookies in front of a picnic table. It is business fundamentals: Always be Selling. Interestingly, we see the pressures not just on Olive but also on the others profiled. Nikki, in Chino, California, wants to be like her older sisters, who not only won a trip to Europe for selling cookies but were also awarded a trophy.

The cookies become less about badges or even a heartfelt message. The sale of these cookies and the more that are sold fuel ambitions and dreams. Be it a trip to a summer camp, a European extravaganza, or a full-time family operation. Olive makes a revealing aside as she and her family plot their next sales endeavor. The spark seems to vanish in her eyes. There is a sense that pressure makes her feel ill, and her parents are more invested in selling cookies than she is.

The film does not indict or even chastise the Girl Scout operation. If anything, the film speaks to the larger tenets of commercialism and consumerism that lord over our daily lives. These girls are emerging into this system and, in a sense, finding their own understanding and place.

In these girls, I see not only the passage of time but also the formation of ideas and the emergence of identities. For as much as Cookie Queens documents our annual obsession over cookies and the power moves and operations that go into selling the delightful treats, it is more demonstrative as an inflection point. Over the course of ninety minutes, we witness the passage of childhood and the end of youth’s innocence. The world is changing, no surprise, but now it feels more apparent than ever. Technology and societal disruptions are happening daily, and people are playing catch-up.

And yet what the film makes clear: For all the sweat and at times frustration, all of these girls, despite the incredible pressures, are shaped by their experience. This is an education. They are not merely passing the time. They are becoming individuals.  

The next time I purchase a Girl Scout cookie, I will see it through a new perspective, not only for the operation behind it, but also for the drive and ambition of its sellers.

Cookie Queens had its World Premiere in the Family Matinee section of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. 

Director: Alysa Nahmias

Rated: NR

Runtime: 91m