“Welcome to Crumbl!” about 15 staff members shout in unison from an industrial-sized kitchen that is prepped with pink boxes, icing, coconut flakes, raspberry jam and lots and lots of sugar.
It’s opening day for the St. Albert location of the popular American cookie chain Crumbl Cookies. This is the third store to open in Canada, and all three of the locations have popped up in the Edmonton area.
“We’ve got connections to friends and family in St. Albert – it was a natural fit; it’s a great community and I felt like it was going to open Crumbl with open arms,” says franchise owner Dan Arndt, pressed against the wall as a fresh crowd of customers swarm the entrance.
Most are high school students.
“It’s the gold standard for TikTok,” Arndt said. “[Crumbl] had six and a half million followers on TikTok, which is more than any of the big brands you can think of.”
Last spring Arndt opened Canada’s first Crumbl on Mullen Road in Edmonton. It was a “spectacle,” he said — the biggest opening day any new Crumbl store had ever seen, with hundreds of customers lined up around the block to get a box of the deserts
Launch day in St. Albert has been a bit more subdued, but that’s not saying much when customers were camped out at 4:30 a.m. for previous openings.
Besides finding an audience on TikTok and looking good on Instagram, “the magic of Crumbl is that it’s six flavours of gourmet cookies every single week,” Arndt said. “And those flavours rotate through a collection of more than 200-250 different flavours all the time. So every single week we have new cookies.”
“I think people really resonate. I know my own kids every single week are like, ‘you gotta bring me home one of every flavour.’”
The store has hired over 60 people, Arndt said.
It is located at 2 Hebert Rd..
