Decadent Crumbl Cookies to open its first central Iowa shop in Ankeny in January

Decadent Crumbl Cookies to open its first central Iowa shop in Ankeny in January

Cookies bigger than the palm of your hand in unusual flavor combinations such as warm snickerdoodle cupcake, Kentucky butter cake and sugar cookies with a Twix topping, served chilled, will come to Ankeny in January when Crumbl Cookies opens its first store in central Iowa.

The cookie shop is slated to open at 802 S.E. Oralabor Road in Ankeny in a 1,698-square-foot space near Walmart in mid-January.

Partner Bart Coon remembers his wife bringing home a long slender pink box filled with four cookies that changed his life.

“We were both patrons first,” Coon says of his interest in opening Crumbl Cookies in Central Iowa with his business partner Rhett Andersen.

Coon fell for the cinnamon cookie with a cream cheese frosting while Andersen loved the red velvet with chocolate chips and cream cheese frosting.

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Each 5.5-ounce cookie is made fresh using familiar ingredients such as sugar, flour, butter and eggs. Once the cookies are baked, they’re considered out of code after two hours and donated to charity to keep inventory fresh.

“It’s the same everywhere in the company,” Coon said. “Everybody gets the same experience, whether it’s in Des Moines or Boise.”

What kind of cookies?

Milk chocolate chip, served chilled, always makes the menu. Crumbl Cookies founders, cousins Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hemsley, created that recipe first in Logan, Utah, in 2017.

A chilled pink sugar cookie regularly appears on the menu, but not all the time. The other four flavors come from a rotation of the 170 recipes Crumbl Cookies created over the years that changes weekly. Every week brings a new sizzle reel on the Crumbl Cookies website featuring the flavors on the menu.

That deep cookbook of recipes include:

• Chilled cookies and cream milkshake with bits of Oreos on top of a sugar cookie slathered in cookies-and-cream icing with a sandwich cookie on top.
• Peach cobbler, which combines a cinnamon oatmeal cobbler cookie with sweet peaches and a crumbly cinnamon streusel topped with a sweet cream cheese glaze.
• The chocolate strawberry cheesecake takes a dark chocolate cookie and then fills it with strawberry cheesecake topped with a chocolate drizzle.
• The hot chocolate cookie served warm comes with marshmallows on top, while the birthday cake cookie features cream cheese frosting and sprinkles.

Perhaps most interesting, a cornbread cookie topped with hot butter and honey buttercream that customers rank at the top among favorites, along with chocolate Oreo.

The cookies come in single servings or neatly packaged in pink boxes filled with four, six or a dozen, each frosted and topped as they’re ordered. Crumbl Cookies also offers ice cream.

Once open in Ankeny, the store plans to keep hours from Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and on Friday and Saturday from 8 a.m. to midnight.

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Why Ankeny?

Coon and Andersen started digging into the Des Moines area before deciding to open a franchise.

“We were just blown away,” Andersen says, mentioning the family values and population growth in the area. “It just seemed like it was kind of this hidden gem sitting right in the Midwest.”

Andersen’s son Ty Andersen, known as Big Ty because he stands 6-foot-8, made the move to the area to help the new store open. He plans to hire 70 people to work in the store.

The Utah-based cookie purveyor plans to bring three shops to the metro area with stores in West Des Moines and Ames already in the works. The shops join more than 300 in 32 states nationwide.

Crumbl Cookies opened its first outpost in Iowa in November in Cedar Rapids.

Susan Stapleton is the entertainment editor at The Des Moines Register. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter or drop her a line at [email protected].