Cookie Queens (2026)
Directed by: Alysa Nahmias
Premise: A documentary following several Girl Scouts as they sell cookies as part of the organization’s annual fundraiser. The scouts and their families set sales goals, some of them quite high, and peddle their wares.
What Works: The Girl Scouts are synonymous with their annual cookie sale and Cookie Queens leans into that public image. The documentary suggests that this organization and its cookie sales program are building the next generation of entrepreneurs and the filmmakers follows several scouts from a variety of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Each of the individual stories is engaging. A few of these scouts are extraordinary sellers, moving thousands of boxes in a few weeks. For Nikki, Girl Scout cookies are a family affair and tied into her relationship with her sister while Olive is an overachiever who keeps raising her goals throughout the sales period but verges on burnout. Other scouts have more modest goals and those stories are the most compelling. Shannon Elizabeth’s working class family takes a significant financial risk; her parents have invested the equivalent of a mortgage payment in cookies which creates real dramatic and financial stakes in their story. Ara is a particularly young scout with health challenges and her story is especially affecting.
What Doesn’t: Cookie Queens is primarily an advertisement for the Girl Scouts. The film exists to market scouting (and the cookie sales program) to the audience. To that end, the filmmakers are not very successful. Cookie Queens reinforces the public image that all Girl Scouts do is sell cookies. We’re told that cookie sales are a vehicle for other activities such as attending camp but we don’t get a sense of anything else Girl Scouts has to offer. While there are a few honest moments in Cookie Queens, the film leaves viewers with the impression that there is a more revealing and more unflattering documentary to be made on this subject. As shown in this film, individual scouts and their families assume all the financial risk—they have to buy the inventory of cookies—and each scout only earns a dollar of each box. This $800 million business comes across exploitative and is buttressed on unpaid child labor. This industry warrants a more critical look than is offered here. The documentary is slickly produced, perhaps suspiciously so. There’s no way to definitively assess Cookie Queens’ integrity but a few sequences have multiple camera coverage and some of the children speak precociously.
Bottom Line: Cookie Queens has to be understood as a feature-length ad for the Girl Scouts. The individual stories are compelling and the documentary is very charming. However, Cookie Queens also raises concerns about the ethics of the Girl Scout cookie business that deserve a fuller exploration.
Episode: #1112 (August 16, 2026)