Crumbl Vs Insomnia: Who Makes A Better Cookie?

It is time for the ultimate cookie chain showdown: Crumbl Cookies vs Insomnia Cookies. If Tiffany and Co. can claim that shade of blue, Crumbl can do the same for its bright pink box—sorry, Barbie. Like Tiffany's, these boxes are sure to spark joy in whoever receives them. Crumbl clearly takes time and care with its large cookies, churning out Instagramable bites since 2017. It clearly strives for a boutique cookie experience.

In the other corner, we have Insomnia. As the name implies, Insomnia Cookies is best well-known for providing late-night bites. The company was started out of a dorm room by enterprising students who saw a previously untapped niche—a bakery open late for students with the munchies. While Insomnia Cookies are less refined, served up in what amounts to a pizza box, in less than picturesque plating or shaping, it is known for its variety of choices and local delivery.

Each cookie company knows its market. But as they have expanded to more and more locations, you may be faced with a choice of which cookie to get. We put three of each company's cookies to the test to find out who makes a better cookie. For Crumbl we tried the Milk Chocolate Chip and Classic Pink Sugar, both of which are available weekly, and Molten Lava, the best-reviewed cookie of the week. For Insomnia, we ordered its most popular cookies, the Classic Chocolate Chunk, Classic Snickerdoodle, and the Deluxe Confetti. Let's see how these cookies crumble.

Crumbl Cookies products are known for being in a class all of their own when it comes to size. The company literally sells a cookie cutter, which will divide your cookie into fours for you. It almost feels like the company knows its cookies are too big. Just put a classic Insomnia cookie and a Crumbl cookie next to each other and you can see the size difference. We wanted to put them to the test, though, so we weighed the cookies.

The first thing to note is that every single Crumbl Cookie weighed over 150 grams. Crumbl's Milk Chocolate Chip cookie is 152, whereas Insomnia's Classic Chocolate Chunk is just 55. That is a weight difference of almost three times. The biggest cookie we weighed was Crumbl's Classic Pink Sugar, which clocked in at a whopping 190 grams.

But wait, that's not all. You see, Insomnia Cookies have two different kinds of cookies. Their classic includes the 55-gram Chocolate Chunk and the 42-gram Snickerdoodle cookie, but they also have the Deluxe. The cookies in the Deluxe category are bigger and often have more things in them. The Deluxe Confetti cookie came in at 121 grams. While still not as big as a Crumbl cookie, they are coming close in size and weight.

Now that we have compared the size differences in the cookies, it is time to take a look at the cost. At first glance, Crumbl cookies seem to be easily more expensive, and on the surface, they are. In our area, an individual cookie from Crumbl will run you $4.68. The price goes down if you buy a four-pack for $15.25, or a six-pack for $23.48. These are not cheap baked goods.

Meanwhile, a classic Insomnia cookie is just $2.70. However, as always, things are a bit more complicated than they appear. Deluxe cookies from Insomnia cost $4.50, nearly as much as a Crumbl cookie. Once again, there are packs for both, which make the cookies cheaper.

With such significant size variations, though, we thought the only fair way to judge the price is the price per cookie. For this, we will take the price for an individual cookie and compare it against the average weight of a cookie from each shop. For a Crumbl Milk Chocolate Chip cookie, the price is about $0.03 per gram. At Insomnia, for a Classic Chocolate Chunk, the price is approximately $0.05 per gram; for the Deluxe Confetti, it is roughly $0.04. This means that in each case, the price per gram of Insomia's cookies is actually higher than that of Crumbl. However, with Crumbl, you can't buy less than one cookie.

The exact recipes for all the cookies are closely guarded secrets; both Insomnia and Crumbl list the ingredients included in the cookies. Both the chocolate chip cookies we tested from Insomnia and Crumbl were made with milk chocolate. Both companies do offer other chocolate chip style cookies, but for Crumbl, the Milk Chocolate Chip is the only standard cookie they have every week.

We have to say, we are impressed with the ingredients in Crumbl Cookies' Milk Chocolate Chip. They include flour, milk chocolate chips, butter, brown sugar, sugar, egg, baking soda, and cornstarch. These honestly sound like homemade cookies made with things most people find in the kitchen. Insomnia's cookie, not so much. In addition to flour, sugar, chocolate chips, and brown sugar, Insomnia chocolate chunk cookies include things like margarine, nonfat dry milk, soy lecithin, monoglycerides, and natural flavors, to name a few not-quite as homemade ingredients inside.

This would seem a point in Crumbl's favor, but things do get a bit more complex with Crumbl's other two cookies, as the Molten Lava uses corn syrup, and Classic Pink Sugar uses artificial colors. The Classic Pink Sugar cookie, though, does now use real almond extract instead of an imitation flavor, and both use real vanilla extract, whereas Insomnia uses imitation vanilla.

Insomnia is home to the regular-size cookies in this showdown. While we would not go so far as to say the cookies are exactly good for you, they are no worse than one would imagine for a cookie. A Chocolate Chunk cookie from Insomnia has 250 calories and 20 grams of sugar. This, perhaps oddly, is more than that of the Snickerdoodle, which is literally rolled in cinnamon sugar. The Snickerdoodle has 180 calories and just 13 grams of sugar. Considering there is much more sugar in a Starbucks Blonde Vanilla Latte, it really is not that bad. So eat the cookies and enjoy them.

That being said, there is a big jump from their standard-sized cookies to the Deluxe Confetti, which is more in just about every way. The Deluxe Confetti Cookie has 570 calories and 46 grams of sugar. This is one big cookie, so you might consider splitting it.

None of the cookies have a ton of vitamins. However, both the Chocolate Chunk and the Confetti cookie have 10% of your daily iron requirements. Which, when coupled with a tasty cookie, is not bad.

Crumbl actually displays some of the nutritional information on the boards at its stores. The calorie contents are listed next to each cookie. However, it should be noted that the calories listed are per serving, not per cookie. Remember that Crumbl cookie cutter? Well, it cuts each cookie into four pieces, and that is what Crumbl considers to be a serving of one of its cookies. So when the Milk Chocolate Chip Cookie says it has 180 calories and 13 grams of sugar, what it actually means is per cookie, there are 720 calories and 52 grams of sugar. Similarly, the Molten Lava cookie is 680 calories and 48 grams of sugar, and the Classic Pink Sugar is 760 calories with 76 grams of sugar.

We are not trying to scare you away from Crumbl Cookies. If you like them, eat them. We are just saying that a holistic view of the nutrition of a Crumbl cookie should be considered, not the substantially smaller "serving size" information the company touts.

It is worth noting, though, Crumbl does offer smaller serving sizes in the form of catering "Mini" cookies. Each of these cookies is a single serving, and so all the nutritional information is for a whole cookie. There are still functionally no vitamins or nutritional benefits, but we appreciate the honesty of their Mini cookies.

Taste is possibly the most important aspect of any cookie. Why eat a cookie that doesn't taste good? Insomnia is a bit all over the place when it comes to the taste of its cookies. The three most popular flavors are not necessarily our favorites. Insomnia is at its best when they are doing wacky and creative flavors, and that is because the base dough that they use is simply not that great. As we saw in the ingredients, they have a lot of extra fillers to help with texture and freshness, but that means there is not much to distinguish them from a grocery store cookie. There is no real vanilla, and the taste suffers.

That being said, they are far from being bad cookies. The Chocolate Chunk is well cooked, with a crunchy outside and chewy inside. Their Milk Chocolate is perfectly acceptable. The Snickerdoodle is flat as a pancake and has an odd aftertaste, but the Deluxe Confetti is fun and also offers a nice crisp bite on the outside.

The cookies are all served warm, which keeps them gooey and delicious, but that means they do get stale fairly quickly.

Crumbl is so close to achieving excellence with its cookies, but it made key strategic mistakes that keep it from reaching perfection.

The company seems to have taken on a bit more than we can chew. The Milk Chocolate Chip's use of "chip" is definitely an understatement. These are full-on Hershey Kisses inside this cookie. We already have the problem with the cookies being mammoth, but the larger chips are not evenly distributed throughout the cookie. Second, the use of milk chocolate instead of semi-sweet means the chocolate flavor simply does not show through.

The Molten Lava cookie, on the other hand, had a consistent chocolate flavor. It was lightly sprinkled with powdered sugar and was almost everything you could want from the cookie. Our one complaint is that the "lava" bits were not fully dispersed, so cutting it into quarters means you end up without lava pieces.

The Classic Pink Sugar Cookie is like a Loft House cookie on steroids. It is large and colorful. It is perhaps overly sweet, though, and as a "chilled" cookie, you can taste that it has been sitting in the refrigerator.

The biggest issue with all these cookies, though, is that they are not baked. And to say they are a bit underbaked doesn't describe what's going on here. Each of them is functionally raw on the inside, as can be seen in the cross-section. They are simply too big and the experience is akin to eating raw cookie dough.

On the surface, it would seem like Crumbl has the advantage. The presentation is gorgeous. Each cookie is immaculately constructed and shaped into perfectly round discs. The boxes show a level of care and elegance not common for foods such as cookies. However, there is one major caveat to this. They are simply not baked well. Crumbl has spent all its time focusing on appearances; they forgot that these are supposed to be cookies and not lightly crisped hunks of dough. The insides of two of our three cookies were functionally raw. The only one that wasn't, ironically, was the Molten Lava cookie. Next time we can put Crumbl cookie up against Cookie DŌ. If Crumbl could have just baked the cookies more or sold the smaller cookies, they could have taken the crown.

Insomnia's products are not elegant. The cookies are not perfectly shaped; some had clearly run into each other during baking. We would even argue the base dough is not as good as Crumbl's, but that is okay. Insomnia knows exactly what it is. It offers unique flavors that are delicious. The cookies are perfectly baked for a crispy outside and chewy inside. You do not need to cut the classic cookies into fourths just to eat them. Even their Deluxe cookies are better baked and are simply more enjoyable. Put quite simply, Insomnia makes a better cookie.