Drive down almost any commercial strip in Utah Valley and you will pass one: white walls, a wall of glass, a line, and a stack of pink boxes moving toward the door. Crumbl is so thoroughly part of the landscape here that most locals assume it started here.
It didn't. It started ninety miles north, in Logan, and only later became a Utah County company.
That distinction turns out to be the most interesting thing about the business, because the move to Lindon is roughly when Crumbl stopped being a cookie shop and became a franchising operation — which is a completely different kind of company.
The origin: one flavor, Cache Valley, 2017
Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hemsley are cousins. In 2017, Hemsley was a student at Utah State University in Logan and McGowan had a background in tech. They set out to build a better chocolate chip cookie, which is not, on its face, a promising premise for a national company.
The part of the story that actually matters is the testing. Rather than guessing, they took recipes to customers — reportedly handing out samples at grocery stores and gas stations and iterating on the feedback. When they opened their first storefront in Logan, the menu had exactly one item: a warm milk chocolate chip cookie.
That is unusual discipline for a first-time food business, and it produced two of the company's durable assets: a recipe people actually preferred in blind comparison, and a founding team already in the habit of asking rather than assuming.
The model, and why it worked
Three decisions did most of the work.
The rotating weekly menu. Instead of a fixed lineup, Crumbl serves a small rotating set drawn from a large library of flavors, refreshed weekly. This solves the hardest problem in dessert retail — there is no natural reason to come back next week — by manufacturing one. It also creates scarcity: if your favorite is up this week, you go this week.
The Sunday-night flavor drop. The following week's lineup is announced on the company's social accounts on Sunday evening. That announcement is a recurring, free marketing event with a built-in audience, and it converts customers into people who check in on the brand weekly whether or not they buy anything.
The open kitchen and the pink box. Stores are built so you can watch the cookies being made, and the packaging is instantly identifiable at a distance and in a photograph. Both choices are about being seen. The box in particular did an enormous amount of unpaid advertising across social platforms during the chain's growth years.
Put together, it is less a bakery model than a media model with a bakery attached — which is also why the company dropped "Cookies" from its branding as the menu expanded into other desserts.
The move to Lindon
Corporate headquarters relocated south to Lindon, in Utah County, and that is where the company runs from today. As of May 2026 reporting, Crumbl employed more than 300 people at its Lindon headquarters.
In December 2025 the company announced it was moving into a larger headquarters building, with co-founder Sawyer Hemsley emphasizing the expanded test kitchen — the room where the weekly flavor library actually gets developed. Hemsley posted photos from the finished space in spring 2026.
Practically, the Lindon headquarters means Crumbl belongs in any honest accounting of Utah Valley employers: several hundred corporate jobs in marketing, franchise support, product development, technology, and operations, in a city that is not otherwise a major employment center. See our biggest employers in Utah Valley guide for where that sits in the broader picture, and our Lindon city guide for the area itself.
How big it actually got
Numbers first, with the caveat that franchise store counts move constantly.
The company said it had nearly 1,200 stores across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico as of December 2025. Coverage in May 2026 described more than 1,000 locations globally, including at least one in every U.S. state. Independent references have put the count near 1,071 as of 2024. All of these are describing the same rough reality: a chain that went from one storefront to roughly a thousand in under a decade.
Nearly all of those stores are owned and operated by franchisees rather than by the company. This is the structural fact that explains most of what follows: Crumbl's corporate revenue comes substantially from franchise fees and royalties, which means the health of the business depends on the health of its franchise operators — a group whose results, it turns out, vary a great deal.
The franchise math, briefly
It is worth understanding what kind of company Crumbl actually is, because it changes how you read every headline about it.
Crumbl does not primarily sell cookies. Its franchisees sell cookies. Crumbl sells the right to sell cookies — the brand, the recipe library, the weekly flavor calendar, the store design, the supply relationships, and the marketing machine — and takes fees and royalties in return.
That structure is why the chain could go from one storefront to roughly a thousand in under a decade. Franchisees supplied the capital and took the operating risk, which let the brand expand at a speed no company-owned chain could match. It is also why the company's fortunes and its operators' fortunes can diverge: corporate revenue scales with the number of open stores, while any individual store's survival depends on local rent, local labor, and local demand.
The weekly menu makes this harder than it looks from the outside. A rotating lineup means constantly retraining staff on new recipes, constantly changing ingredient orders, and absorbing the reality that some weeks the flavors land and some weeks they don't. A store's revenue can swing meaningfully depending on what the calendar assigned it that week — a variable most bakery owners never have to think about.
The cookie wars
No account of Crumbl is complete without the litigation, which became a genuine Utah business spectacle.
On May 10, 2022, Crumbl sued two smaller Utah competitors — Dirty Dough and Crave Cookies — alleging their logos, websites, packaging, and presentation were confusingly similar to Crumbl's. The complaint against Dirty Dough went further, accusing it of obtaining recipes and internal documents through a former Crumbl employee who was the brother of one of Dirty Dough's founders.
Both defendants were tiny at the time relative to Crumbl. The size mismatch became the story.
Dirty Dough leaned all the way into it. Founder Bennett Maxwell put up billboards reading "Cookies so good we're being sued!" and "We don't file lawsuits, we just have better cookies!" He later told KSL that sales rose afterward, describing the suit as the best thing that could have happened to the company. Crave's co-founder Trent English publicly disputed the resemblance, pointing out that Crave's branding was black and gold against Crumbl's pink and black.
The outcomes:
- Crave. In July 2023 the two companies jointly moved to dismiss, announcing an amicable settlement on confidential terms and wishing each other well.
- Dirty Dough. In August 2023, U.S. District Judge Howard Nielson denied Crumbl's motion for a preliminary injunction while ordering Dirty Dough to return Crumbl's trade-secret documents — a split result both sides claimed. In October 2023 the two filed notice that they had agreed to settlement terms.
Reasonable people read the episode differently. One view: a company protecting recipes and trade dress it had spent real money developing, which is what trademark law exists for. The other: a market leader spending legal budget against startups over cookie photographs and box shapes. What is not in dispute is that the fight was extraordinarily good publicity for the smaller companies and mixed publicity for the larger one.
The harder stretch
This is the part that local coverage tends to skip, and skipping it produces a false picture.
2023. Employees raised public complaints about mass layoffs.
2025. About 10% of the corporate workforce was cut, including the chief operating officer, according to Bloomberg Businessweek reporting in December. The same reporting described a widening gap between the chain's successful locations and its struggling ones — the predictable maturation problem for any franchise that expands quickly into markets of very different sizes.
May 2026. In an open letter posted to social media, McGowan and Hemsley announced they were stepping away from day-to-day operating roles. McGowan had been CEO and Hemsley chief brand officer; chief technology officer Bryce Redd was announced as departing his role at the same time. All three said they intended to remain on the board once replacements were found, with McGowan planning to serve as chairman. "This is not a goodbye to Crumbl," McGowan wrote.
Founder transitions of this kind are genuinely ambiguous, and it is worth resisting the urge to read them as a verdict. A founder-led company handing operations to professional management around the ten-year mark is an ordinary lifecycle event, and it is what most franchise systems eventually do. It can also follow a stretch of results the board wants changed. Both readings are consistent with the public facts, and the public facts do not settle it.
Leadership as of this writing. The company was searching for successors when the founders' letter went out. Executive appointments may have been made since; confirm current leadership with the company directly rather than relying on this page.
What to watch next
Three things will tell you more about where Crumbl is heading than any single quarter of headlines.
Who takes the CEO job. An internal promotion and an outside operator from a large franchise system imply very different plans. Franchise chains that bring in outside restaurant-industry leadership usually do so with a mandate around unit economics — closing weak locations, tightening operating standards, slowing new openings.
Whether net store count keeps rising. Gross openings are the number companies like to publicize. Net openings, after closures, are the number that describes the health of the system. If the chain is opening and closing at similar rates, the story is consolidation rather than growth, regardless of how the announcements read.
Whether the menu keeps widening. Dropping "Cookies" from the brand name was a signal. A company that intends to remain a cookie chain does not do that. Watch how much of the weekly lineup is something other than a cookie — that ratio is the clearest public indicator of where management thinks the next decade of revenue comes from.
Making the weekly system work for you
Practical, for people who live here:
- The lineup is announced Sunday evening on the company's social accounts. If you care which flavors are up, that's when to look — not Monday at the counter.
- Assume nothing repeats on a schedule. Flavors return, but not predictably. If a favorite is up and you want it, this is the week.
- Weekends and evenings are the crush. Weekday afternoons are consistently the calmer visit at most Utah Valley locations.
- Verify hours before a late run. Store hours vary by location and change, and most Utah Valley dessert businesses are closed Sundays — including this one.
What it means locally
A few things worth holding onto if you live here.
It is a real Utah Valley employer, not just a storefront brand. Several hundred corporate jobs in Lindon is meaningful for a city of Lindon's size, and those roles are the kind — marketing, product, franchise operations, technology — that keep graduates from BYU and UVU in the valley rather than sending them out of state.
The franchise base here is dense, and that cuts both ways. Utah Valley has a high concentration of Crumbl locations relative to population, which is convenient for customers and harder for operators — stores in the same metro compete with each other for the same weekend traffic. When national coverage discusses the gap between strong and struggling franchise locations, saturated home markets are one of the standard mechanisms behind it.
It is a Cache Valley origin story, and the record should say so. Utah Valley has enough genuine founding stories that it doesn't need to claim this one. Our guide to companies actually founded in Utah Valley covers the ones that belong on that list.
It fits a Utah pattern more than a cookie pattern. Rapid national franchise expansion out of a Utah base, powered by an unusually social sales-and-marketing culture, is the same shape as several other companies from this state. Crumbl just did it with dessert instead of alarms or supplements. The broader pattern is in our Silicon Slopes explainer and our guide to summer sales jobs in Utah.
The honest read
Crumbl is simultaneously one of the most successful consumer businesses Utah has ever produced and a company going through the hardest stretch of its existence. Both statements are true, and coverage that picks only one of them is telling you less than it seems to.
What the company built is genuinely impressive and genuinely difficult to copy: a marketing system that generates weekly attention without weekly ad spend, and a product simple enough to execute in a thousand kitchens. What it now has to solve is the problem every fast franchise system eventually reaches — how to keep the operators who bought into the growth story profitable once the growth slows and the market fills in.
For Utah Valley, the practical stake is a few hundred corporate jobs in Lindon and a brand that put a Utah company in front of a national audience. Neither of those is in immediate question. How the next two years go will be decided by people whose names most of us do not know yet.
If you're just here for the cookies
Locations are spread across Provo, Orem, and the north-county cities, and hours and lineups vary by store — check the company's app or site for the current week rather than trusting anything written in advance, including this.
For the rest of the valley's dessert landscape, including the local bakeries that were here long before the pink box, see our guides to desserts and bakeries and ice cream in Provo and Orem.
Frequently Asked Questions
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