Are Girl Scout cookies vegan? Every cookie checked, by bakery

Some are. Thin Mints are made with vegan ingredients at both bakeries that make Girl Scout cookies, and ABC Bakers adds Lemonades and Peanut Butter Patties. Every other Little Brownie Bakers cookie lists milk, whey or butter. So the bakery your local council buys from decides most of the answer.

Adventurefuls show it best. Both bakeries sell a cookie by that name, and the Girl Scouts site describes it once, as a brownie-inspired cookie with caramel flavored crème and a hint of sea salt. The ABC Bakers version lists sugar, flour, palm oils, cocoa, molasses and corn syrup, and nothing from an animal. The Little Brownie Bakers version lists nonfat milk and milk. Girl Scouts explains the split in one line: each council contracts with one of two licensed bakers, “whose recipes and ingredients may differ slightly”. For a vegan, “slightly” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence.

ABC doesn’t call its Adventurefuls vegan, either. Its FAQ names three cookies made with vegan ingredients, and Adventurefuls isn’t one of them; a separate answer on the same page says Adventurefuls contain no milk ingredient. And the kosher mark won’t sort them for you. ABC says every one of its Girl Scout cookies carries the OU-D symbol, the D meaning dairy ingredients or equipment that may also run dairy products, so its vegan Thin Mints wear the same D as its Trefoils. Our roundup of vegan Halloween candy goes through what that D can and can’t tell you.

Which bakery serves your council?

Girl Scouts’ own advice is to ask your local council which cookies it sells. The faster tell is the order card, because each bakery has names the other doesn’t use. ABC Bakers sells Lemonades, Peanut Butter Patties, Caramel deLites, Peanut Butter Sandwich and Caramel Chocolate Chip. Little Brownie Bakers sells Samoas, Tagalongs, Do-si-dos, Lemon-Ups and Toffee-tastic. Thin Mints, Trefoils, Adventurefuls and Exploremores appear under the same names in both lineups, and those are the boxes where the name tells you nothing.

So if the card says Tagalongs, the Adventurefuls on it contain milk. If it says Peanut Butter Patties, they don’t. The panel on the box has the last word either way, and we’d read it.

Prices aren’t set by either bakery. Little Brownie says each of the 111 Girl Scout councils sets its own consumer price, and ABC says the same about pricing varying from council to council, so we haven’t listed one.

Every Girl Scout cookie, by bakery

Read from both bakeries’ product pages in October 2026. A dash means that bakery doesn’t make the cookie. Girl Scouts treats Peanut Butter Patties and Tagalongs as one cookie with two names, and the same for Caramel deLites and Samoas and for Peanut Butter Sandwich and Do-si-dos.

Cookie	ABC Bakers	Little Brownie Bakers
Thin Mints	Vegan ingredients, per ABC	Vegan ingredients, per Little Brownie
Peanut Butter Patties / Tagalongs	Vegan ingredients, per ABC	Not vegan: whey
Adventurefuls	Nothing animal listed; no milk ingredient, per ABC	Not vegan: nonfat milk, milk
Lemonades	Vegan ingredients, per ABC	–
Caramel Chocolate Chip (gluten free)	Nothing animal listed	–
Lemon-Ups	–	Not vegan: whey protein concentrate
Toffee-tastic (gluten free)	–	Not vegan: butter
Caramel deLites / Samoas	Not vegan: sweetened condensed milk, whey	Not vegan: sweetened condensed milk
Peanut Butter Sandwich / Do-si-dos	Not vegan: whey	Not vegan: whey
Trefoils	Not vegan: whey	Not vegan: sweetened condensed milk, buttermilk
Exploremores	Not vegan: whey	Not vegan: whey

ABC has five cookies with no animal ingredient on the list, and Little Brownie has one.

The cookies to buy, and the lookalike to skip

Thin Mints from ABC Bakers

ABC’s own page says the cookie’s “all-vegan ingredient list means anyone can enjoy it”, and the list backs it up: flour, sugar, palm and palm kernel shortening, cocoa, caramel color, invert sugar, salt, baking soda, soy lecithin, peppermint oil and flavor. It is on ABC’s FAQ list of vegan-ingredient cookies and on the Girl Scouts site’s short list for vegans.

The flaw is in the small print. ABC makes it in a shared facility with milk and peanuts, and says its vegan-ingredient cookies may run on equipment that also makes dairy products. If you avoid traces of milk for allergy reasons rather than ethical ones, that line matters more than the vegan claim.

Thin Mints from Little Brownie Bakers

Same name, different recipe. Little Brownie’s list adds soybean oil, cornstarch and sorbitan tristearate, and the page says the cookies are made with vegan ingredients in a facility that handles non-vegan ones. The shared-facility line here is longer than ABC’s: peanuts, tree nuts, milk and egg.

In a Little Brownie council this is the only box to buy. Every other cookie in its lineup lists milk, whey or butter, so a vegan who walks up to a Little Brownie booth has a choice of one. Buy two boxes.

Peanut Butter Patties

Peanut butter, sugar, flour and palm shortening, with cocoa, invert sugar, leavening, soy lecithin, salt and flavor under 2%, and an allergen line naming soy, wheat and peanuts. ABC lists it as made with vegan ingredients. The Girl Scouts site recommends it to vegans by this name only, and that is the right way round, because the Little Brownie cookie it pairs with, Tagalongs, lists whey and peanut flour near the end.

Don’t buy this one if peanuts are the problem in your house. Peanut is in the allergen line, and the facility also handles milk and eggs.

Lemonades

A shortbread with lemon-flavored icing, by the Girl Scouts site’s description, and the cookie on the list that looks most like it ought to contain butter. It doesn’t. ABC’s list runs flour, sugar, palm and palm kernel shortening, cornstarch, corn syrup, leavening, flavor, salt, soy lecithin, annatto for color, citric acid and malic acid, with soy and wheat as the only allergens. ABC names it as made with vegan ingredients.

Only ABC makes it. Little Brownie’s lemon cookie is Lemon-Ups, which lists whey protein concentrate, so the lemon box at a Little Brownie booth is the wrong lemon box.

Adventurefuls from ABC Bakers

Our pick of the boxes nobody puts on a vegan list. ABC’s version has sugar, flour, palm kernel and palm shortening, cocoa, cornstarch, caramel color, molasses, corn syrup, salt, soy lecithin, flavor, baking soda, sea salt and paprika oleoresin for color, and an allergen line of wheat and soy. The “caramel flavored crème” gets there without a dairy ingredient. ABC confirms there is no milk ingredient in it.

What ABC doesn’t do is call it vegan: it is missing from the FAQ’s three vegan-ingredient cookies and from the Girl Scouts site’s vegan short list. Neither page says why, and the list doesn’t say where the natural flavor comes from. If you only buy what a maker has called vegan, leave it. And if your council buys from Little Brownie, leave it regardless, because that Adventurefuls lists milk.

Caramel Chocolate Chip

ABC’s gluten-free cookie, and another caramel cookie with no milk on the list: oat flour, sugar, chocolate chips (sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, dextrose, sunflower lecithin), canola oil, water, coconut oil, tapioca starch, chickpea flour, invert sugar, molasses and a few more, nothing from an animal. Like Adventurefuls, it has no vegan claim from ABC.

Two catches. Not every ABC council sells it, and ABC says it costs more than the other cookies because gluten-free production does. And the pages don’t quite agree with each other: the FAQ says it is made in a dedicated gluten-free facility, while the product page’s allergen line says the facility also processes milk, egg, peanut, tree nuts, wheat, soy and sesame. If you need it gluten free as well as vegan, ask the council before you rely on either.

Girl Scout Sparkables

The one Girl Scout cookie that says vegan on the box. It is an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie with sprinkles, made with Partake, and the box on Partake’s product page lists vegan among its claims. Partake’s FAQ says all its products are plant-based, with no dairy, eggs or honey, and the sprinkles use carnauba wax, a plant wax.

You can’t buy it at a booth. Partake’s page says it is sold only through Digital Cookie, the Girl Scouts’ online store, from 12 January 2027 or the start of the season in your area, and shipped for a limited time. If the point is buying from the kid at the supermarket door, this isn’t your box.

Partake Soft Baked Lemon

For the other ten months, when Lemonades are gone. Partake says these are gluten free, vegan and free of the top 9 allergens, and the list is flour from rice, oats and cassava, sunflower oil, cane sugar, fructose, tapioca, lemon juice powder, lemon extract and a few gums and extracts. Partake’s facility is free of all 9 major allergens, which neither Girl Scout bakery can say of its own.

It is not a Lemonades copy. Partake describes a soft, chewy cookie, where Lemonades is a shortbread. It also sells only by the case on Partake’s site: $34.99 for 6 boxes of 5.5 oz, about $5.83 a box by our arithmetic. Prices change.

Keebler Fudge Mint Delights

A supermarket stand-in for Thin Mints, and the one to put back. Keebler describes a crispy mint cookie dipped in fudge, and its ingredient list has whey after the cocoa, with milk in the allergen line. Thin Mints from either bakery list no dairy at all, so the off-season copy is less vegan than the real thing. Buy an extra box of Thin Mints in season instead.

The ones with milk in them

Everything else in both lineups has a dairy ingredient on its own product page. Samoas and Caramel deLites both use sweetened condensed milk, and Caramel deLites add whey. Do-si-dos and Peanut Butter Sandwich both list whey. Trefoils fail at both bakeries in different ways: whey and a milk-derived flavor at ABC, sweetened condensed milk and buttermilk at Little Brownie. Toffee-tastic, Little Brownie’s gluten-free cookie, has butter twice, once in the dough and again in the toffee bits.

Exploremores is described as a sandwich cookie with chocolate, marshmallow and toasted crème. Neither bakery’s list shows gelatin, the usual problem with marshmallow, and both list whey.

Toast-Yay and Raspberry Rally still turn up on older vegan lists, including the previous version of this page. Neither appears in either bakery’s current lineup. A list built around them is out of date.

For more products that go wrong in the same quiet way, see our list of foods that turn out not to be vegan.

How to check a box yourself

Turn it over and find the allergen statement. Milk is one of the 9 major allergens a US label has to declare, and every Girl Scout cookie on this page that contains dairy names milk in its Contains line. A Contains line without milk is the first pass. Then read the ingredients for anything the allergen rule doesn’t cover.

The “manufactured in a shared facility with” line is a different thing. It lists allergens in the building, not in the cookie, and most of the bakery pages carry one; Little Brownie says all its cookies are made in a facility shared with tree nuts. Whether that rules a cookie out is your call; it doesn’t change what is in it.

Ignore the D next to the kosher mark for this purpose. ABC puts OU-D on everything, vegan-ingredient cookies included. Halal certification won’t settle it either; Girl Scouts says every variety is certified kosher and halal, the Samoas along with the Thin Mints.

Sugar is the one thing no label here answers. Nothing we read on either bakery’s site says where its sugar comes from, so if bone char sugar is your line, the box can’t help and the council is the next call.

In an ABC council, buy Thin Mints, Lemonades and Peanut Butter Patties, and add Adventurefuls if a clean list is enough for you. In a Little Brownie council, buy Thin Mints and stop there. For the rest of the year’s store-bought treats, our roundup of store-bought vegan Christmas food includes Partake’s ginger snaps.