Burlington County’s first Crumbl Cookies bakery story is open at the popular Centerton Square shopping center in Mount Laurel NJ. Today (Thursday) is considered a ”soft opening” day and Friday January 5th is billed as the official Grand Opening, when visitors will receive one free milk chocolate chip cookie!
If you’re aren’t familiar with Crumbl, they are a cookie bakery franchise who mastered the model of focusing solely on delicious and large cookies, offering a menu of only 6 options at a time… and changing the menu to surprising new flavor choices per week.
The new Mount Laurel Crumbl Cookies is owned by South Jersey residents Jericho and Emily, who also own Crumbl locations in Turnersville and Princeton. (42Freeway first reported on Mount Laurel in March 2023)
Jericho was kind but enough to remember me from my coverage of the Turnerville location, and invited me to their Mount Laurel preview event which took place yesterday.
While it’s awesome to celebrate the first Burlington County location, the reality is… the Crumbl Cookie brand has only been in South Jersey for 18 months, starting with the Cherry Hill location!
But they are expanding very quickly throughout all of South Jersey, and there are very few commercial sectors booming more than Mount Laurel’s Centerton Square Shopping Center (which is located off of Route 38 at the Route 295 exit. )
Centerton Square features Wegmans, Costco and Topgolf as large lead tenants, but also offers many other awesome retailers including the recently opened Tommy’s Tavern & Tap (which I visited on opening day and shared the experience with the readers)
For the Mount Laurel Crumbl store, it is located in the center of the middle building in the complex (which has Panera Bread on the left end). Pho Xinh Vietnamese Restaurant is their next door neighbor, and it appears that Radiant Waxing is taking over the former subway location on the other side of Crumbl.
Crumbl Cookies – Mount Laurel
If you’ve visited more than one Crumbl location you’ve realized that Crumbl has a theme to their store design, and the new Mount Laurel location follows it perfectly. Jericho mentioned that it’s a match of their Turnersville location, accept everything is reversed left-right.
The largest portion of a Crumbl store is allocated to the cookie bakery area, which leaves a small customer order/waiting area at the front of the store.
Typically, for a significant amount of time after a new location opens there are long lines of customers waiting to place their orders.… lines which extend outside of the store!
Crumbl stores are designed with a bright white décor and equally bright lighting with, several signature pink accent touches throughout the space.
Add in some of their logos and other design elements, and it creates an inviting and very clean bakery retail store.
It’s clear that all of the cookies are made right in the location as directly behind the counter are two very large dough mixing machines!
And while the design does have some separation of the main kitchen in the back to the front counter area, the opening to the back is very large and you can see the staff preparing the cookies, as well as all of the ovens that are used to bake the delicious cookies on site.
According to the folks over at patch.com during the initial days of being open orders can only be placed in person only, and starting January 10th the digital ordering options kick which support delivery, curbside pickup and catering… which are all done via the Crumbl app or at crumblcookies.com
Crumbl Cookies – The Phenomenon
Crumbl Cookies is a wildly successful cookie bakery franchise which uses a unique marketing model to bring customers back again and again, boosted by a strong social media presence and following.
Crumbl is able to create a consistent strong rush of customers to the store each week, eager to buy the latest cookie flavors.
But of course they have to have a delicious product to back it all up, and Crumbl makes an amazing cookie… from a list of almost 200 different recipes!
A Crumbl Cookie is much larger and thicker than a traditional cookie, and the flavor varieties typically include innovative toppings.
A unique and successful twist to their business model is they only offer six varieties of cookies each week, and one of them is always the milk chocolate chip variety.
As an example, this week’s varieties are Blueberry Muffin, Mallow Sandwich (featuring Oreo), Skillet Cookie, Confetti Milkshake, Galaxy Brownie and of course.. Milk Chocolate Chip!
On every Sunday of each week they make their announcement of what the upcoming week’s cookie options will be. While they can repeat cookies from many months ago, it seems they try add in at least one new variety regularly. It’s always a surprise learning what’s on the menu for the next seven days.
So keeping the choices limited for seven days not only gets customers excited to run to the store to try something they’ve never had before… but if you’ve had a favorite flavor that you’ve tried many months ago, you’re also just as likely to head back out to your local Crumbl again to buy your favorite, because in another week it’s going to be gone for who knows how long!
The other aspect of the marketing model which drives customers back to the store again and a gain is that young social media influencers really jumped on the rotating menu model, putting together short tick-tock and Instagram videos the influencer at Crumbl, sharing with followers the experience of eating that week’s variety!
Honestly I don’t know if Crumbl sponsored some of these influencers, or they just found it on their own.. but it’s been a widely successful way to spread the brand nationwide, and pack customers into stores. Some of these videos can pull multiple hundreds of thousands of views!
So take a delicious product, with an innovative idea to change up the menu weekly, coupled with an impressive social media presence… has led to wild growth of the chain
Crumble Cookies started in 2017 by two cousins who opened up a cookie bakery in the area of Utah University College. At the time they only had the milk chocolate chip cookie.
The created and tested new flavors to expand the menu, and quickly created a franchise model.
in just a couple years there were hundreds of locations, and the latest stats from September 2023 show that there are over 900 Crumbl Stores in the United States and Canada. This is just in six years!
Links and Location
Crumbl Cookies Mount Laurel
Centerton Square Shopping Center
32 Centerton Road
Mount Laurel NJ
- Mon-Thurs 8am-10pm
- Fri-Sat 8am-Midnight
