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To answer this tasty question, we scouted through the Yahoo! Girl Scouts Cookies category, which led straight to the official cookie site from the Girl Scouts of the USA. The famous cookie sales began in 1917, only five years after the organization was founded. But the sale wasn't a national phenomenon until much later. At first, a few troops sold cookies baked at home by the girls and their mothers to raise money for troop activities. The Mistletoe Troop of Muskogee, Oklahoma, held the first recorded sale, offering their home-baked goodies in their high-school cafeteria in December 1917. Unfortunately,
the type of cookies they sold wasn't noted, but we do have details about a classic recipe featured in the Girl Scouts' national magazine in July 1922. Florence E. Neil, a Girl Scout director in Chicago, published the sugar cookie recipe and suggested that troops sell it as a fundraiser. Home-baked cookies were the norm for Girl Scouts until the 1930s. In 1934, the greater Philadelphia Girl Scout council was the very first to sell commercially baked cookies. The following year, the greater New York group also sold commercial cookies and stamped "Girl Scout Cookies" on the boxes. Finally, in 1936, the national Girl Scouts organization started licensing commercial bakers to produce the official Girl Scout cookies. Early
varieties included sandwich cookies, shortbread, and the chocolate mint cookie now known as the Thin Mint. Today, Thin Mints are the top sellers, accounting for 25% of all Girl Scout cookie sales. According to ABC Bakers -- one of the bakeries licensed by Girl Scouts of the USA -- Thin Mints are the third most popular cookie sold in the United States. Here's a tip from us: buy an extra box of Thin Mints and stick it in the freezer. Then you can enjoy an icy-cold mint chocolate cookie in the middle of August!
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