WASHINGTON—Everyone knows that Girl Scout cookies aren’t health food. But even the trained nutritionists at the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest were shocked to see just how bad a new Thin Mint Cookie Blizzard from Dairy Queen is. The large, which weighs more than a pound, has more than 1,000 calories, 31 teaspoons of sugars, and provides more than a day’s saturated fat. It’s like drinking two Big Macs, according to CSPI.
CSPI said today that the Girl Scouts of the USA should have thought twice before lending (renting, actually) its good name to the ice cream chain.
“Our partnership with Dairy Queen enables us to reach the public in new and unexpected places,” said Laurel Richie, who holds the position of “chief marketing officer” of the Girl Scouts of the USA, in a press release. Those “unexpected places” will include the waistlines and coronary arteries of at least 10 million people by the end of the month if the company meets its projections. Dairy Queen is on track to sell that many Thin Mint Blizzards by the end of July it told USA Today, but the chain and the Girl Scouts are both mum on how much money has changed hands.
“Selling cookies door to door is one thing,” said CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson. “But renting out its nonprofit brand name to a junk-food chain is a major badge of shame for the Girl Scouts. It runs counter to the Girl Scouts’ mission, and this product and its marketing campaign deliver a very unhealthful message to young girls and others. If you were designing a product with the intent of promoting obesity and type-2 diabetes in girls, it would look exactly like the Thin Mint Blizzard.”
A Thin Mint Cookie Blizzard is soft-serve mint and vanilla ice cream combined with Thin Mint cookies and topped with a creme-de-menthe flavored syrup made out of high-fructose corn syrup and containing the controversial artificial food dyes Yellow 5 and Green 3. Even a small size has the calories (540) and a little more saturated fat (12 grams) than a Big Mac.
Minneapolis-based Dairy Queen is owned by Warren Buffet’s wildly successful holding company Berkshire Hathaway.