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Costco’s Massive Chocolate Chip Cookie Is the Food That Defines Our Era
We live in overwhelming times. A big, warm, unpretentious variant on an American original soothes the soul.
L-R: Chocolate chip cookies from Metropolitan Market, Costco, and QFC
In my memory is a chocolate chip cookie the size of my stretched out hand, a uniform patty of dense chew flecked with miniature chocolate chips, wrapped in funky-smelling foodservice plastic wrap. In the ‘90s I could buy one from my school snack bar for 75¢ and pick chunks off of it for an hour. There’s no halo around this cookie in my mind, no nostalgia-driven belief that it was the best chocolate chip cookie I’ve ever had. It was reliable, comforting, and available.
I got flashbacks when I tasted Costco’s massive food court cookie, introduced earlier this year. Their modern version is more seductive, airier and crisp at the edges, with warm chunks of chocolate yielding to the touch, but it’s got “reliable” down. The $2.49 price tag is a step up by Costco standards, yet in 2024 that’s still cheaper than a Starbucks latte. The scent is exactly the brown sugar and butter I expect, and the taste comes at me sweetness first. It doesn’t fall apart too quickly when I bite it. My kids liked it.
You too might not be blown away by Costco’s cookie, but these days, aren’t you tired of being blown this way and that by just…everything? This cookie’s got you.
We’re living in a capital-M Moment. The American Psychological Association says we have “collective trauma,” following a pandemic with well-publicized troubles in every sphere. Supermarket News reports grocery prices are still rising, making consumers “angry, anxious, and frustrated” while shopping. Stores like Trader Joe’s (and Costco) even capitalize on the overwhelming options of the modern industrial world by intentionally offering less choice.
Costco’s cookie is nothing new--you already have this cookie in your head, or something like it. You’ve eaten Crumbl’s milk chocolate chip, or Subway’s footlong, or you’ll argue all day for Levain’s. They’re all warm, big, and about $5 or less. But Costco’s cookie is the pared-down snapshot of 2024. After you’ve spent an hour pushing a giant cart and paying more than ever to outfit your household, the cookie is there for you: comforting to every physical sense, and comforting in its non-divisiveness, its price, its generous nature.
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Chocolate chip cookies have been there for us before. They’ve met the needs of each era with the ultimate in unchallenging comfort food, and corporations have figured out how best to sell them to us.
Let’s take a jog through history. You’re probably acquainted with the story of Ruth Wakefield, the Massachusetts restaurateur who invented the chocolate chip cookie in the 1930s as a small, crisp accompaniment to her Toll House Inn’s ice cream. Megan J. Elias, a food historian at Boston University, says the cookies would have been “a relatively cheap and very easy way to have a treat,” and indeed the recipe took off. World War II began soon after, when Nestlé’s chocolate ads urged women to save up their scarce and rationed chocolate for an act of patriotism, making crowd-favorite Toll House cookies to send to the boys at the front. In fact, says Carolyn Wyman in The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book, “chocolate chip cookies’ fame was boosted by wartime soldier consumption… after [the war], Toll House cookies rivaled apple pie as the most popular dessert recipe in the country.”
During the booming postwar years, supermarkets and vastly increased processing capabilities made chocolate chip cookies a premixed and packaged staple along with a home-baked one. Corporations didn’t take over the fresh market until after the social and economic upheaval of the late 1960s and 1970s, which shook the nation with fights over racial and gender rights, the Vietnam War, a recession, and more. During the ensuing conservative backlash of the 1980s, that commodified display of social unity, the great American mall, brought suburban families and latchkey teens to Mrs. Fields’ glass cookie counters, the soothing smell wafting across the food court. In her Eater profile of Debbi Fields, Bettina Makalintal especially notes the appeal of Fields’ image being both traditional and contemporary: “She, just as much as her cookies, conveyed the enticing idea, or wholesome memory, of a caring mother’s quest to create the best for her family.”
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Remember the giddy cupcake craze? Cupcakes’ fluffy, colorful risen form was as buoyant as Sarah Jessica Parker’s tulle skirts on Sex and the City. In the show’s glamorously idyllic New York City, for 15 seconds in 2000, characters noshed on cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery and set off a trend. Chocolate chip cookies helped make up that aspirational urban landscape too, through Levain Bakery’s big and tall cookies. Carolyn Wyman argues David Leite propelled Levain’s and similar New York cookies through an article in the New York Times, one that included a recipe with a 36-hour intermission. She says Levain’s, Leite’s, and other cookies of the time were famous more for their perfectionist tinkering than for anything else, and that makes sense in our national history: 2008 was the year of Obama’s hope and change, when obsessive baking matched the excitable political moment for urbanites and urbanite wannabes.
In 2015, affiliated upscale grocery chains Bristol Farms, New Seasons, and Metropolitan Market began serving The Cookie--that’s what it’s called, “The Cookie”--up and down the West Coast. Metropolitan Market’s website strongly implies it was Levain’s cookie that spurred its own recipe development, saying “it all started when our founder Terry Halverson walked down a particular Manhattan street.” A symbiosis of elite discernment and decadent appeal for moneyed shoppers treating themselves, The Cookie has walnuts and two types of chocolate--appealing to would-be sophisticates, but not the broadest crowd pleaser. Just as Levain’s lofty cookie spent years as a traveler’s cult delicacy and a home baker’s inspiration, The Cookie has stuck to coastal metropolitan markets.
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Something has changed in the last decade, and it’s not just the Sex and the City cast hitting their AARP years: It feels like everything sucks now. You can stand in the grocery aisle with your head in your phone, reading by-the-minute updates on the latest war or political battle--or the latest boastful influencer making you feel worse about your own life--and then look up and mechanically grab your carton of oat milk out of the cold case. Try not to think about how you’ve heard oat milk isn’t actually good for you, and it’s super expensive, but at least it doesn’t make you feel bad about the environment. Besides, if you reconsider, then you have to step back and choose among all the other cartons and jugs.
My Seattle-area QFC, a midrange Kroger subsidiary, paints a picture of the supermarket chocolate chip cookie landscape. I counted about 40 options in the packaged goods aisle (depending on how I defined “chocolate chip”) and another 7 in the bakery in plastic clamshells and boxes with cellophane windows. Most packages were bright and covered with text, not so different from all the other information I ingest all day, pictures on screens or pictures on bags. And do I really want to take home, and potentially eat, a whole box?
Then there’s the price. The USDA’s all-food Consumer Price Index says food prices grew 25% between 2019 and 2023, and it certainly feels like we’re paying more for less. Historian Elias says when we’re in this kind of bind, food is where we end up putting our hard-earned cash: “In times or places where people don’t feel they have a lot of disposable income, they seem to be drawn to food treats.” We’ve even relabeled our basic food purchases a luxury, as a recent McKinsey study does when calling groceries “the new biggest splurge category.”
So we splurge, just a little, while we’re out buying zucchini and paper towels anyway. Even QFC began selling large, warm chocolate chip cookies a couple years ago, though they have the choice of with or without walnuts. And only a few QFCs serve the cookies, and only sometimes, and it’s self-serve, like the donuts.
But when I bought the cookie at Costco, the nice person at the counter gave it to me directly, hand to hand. It was cheaper than the other grocery stores’ big cookies. It had no branding or packaging other than a brown paper sleeve slowly growing translucent with butter. There were tables where I could sit down and stop thinking about my shopping list and the news. The basic chocolate chip well satisfied both my middle-aged standards and my kids’ cautious taste buds. And I’d only had one choice I needed to make: Either order it, or don’t.
