Aldi Vs Girl Scout Cookies: Are The Copycats Worth The Lower Price?

Most seasons feature a change in weather patterns. Sometimes there's more rain, sometimes there's more sunshine, and, of course, snow. Other seasons feature baseball or football, but one very special season features perhaps the most delicious of all seasonal accessories: cookies. Girl Scout cookie season runs from January to mid-April. During that time, cookie fans flock to cookie stands and eagerly sign up on office cookie forms to collect their yearly stash. Once those cookies arrive, the smartest among us stash a few away in the freezer to enjoy during the off-cookie season. Others of us dive right in; before we know it, the cookies are long gone. Then, just as soon as Girl Scout cookie season comes, it leaves again. For many of us, the dry season is just far less delicious without these cookies.

Well, there's hope. Benton's, a brand of cookies and other sweets you can pick up from Aldi, has an impressive array of Girl Scout cookie copycats that might solve those cravings all year long. Some of them aren't quite the same, but in a pinch, and definitely in the off-season, these cookies may be the perfect alternative. In fact, you might even find that you prefer some of the offerings to your yearly purchase of Girl Scout cookies.

In their purest form, Girl Scout cookies are fundraisers. Scouts as young as kindergarteners, all the way through seniors in high school, sell Girl Scout cookies. Produced by ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers, the two brands produce similar, though not exactly the same, cookies. George Weston Limited owns Interbake Foods, and ABC Bakers Division is one of its businesses. Little Brownie Bakers is one of the divisions of Ferrero U.S.A. Between the two brands, the full range includes Adventurefuls, Caramel Chocolate Chip, Caramel deLites (also called Samoas), Peanut Butter Sandwiches (or Do-si-dos), Girl Scout S'mores, Lemonades, Lemon-Ups, Peanut Butter Patties (also known as Tagalongs), Thin Mints, Toast-Yay!, Toffee-tastic, and Trefoils.

In the 2025 cookie season, the price of each cookie was $6. The Girl Scouts of Kentuckiana (an intersection of Kentucky and Indiana) provides a breakdown of how that $6 roughly gets distributed. It notes $1.30 goes toward the cost of making cookies, and less than a dollar (about $0.84) stays with the troop for activities and projects. From there, some of the money goes toward the cookie program, including rewards to scouts. Other money goes for supporting camps and adventuring, bringing in new scouts through recruitment, fundraising, and marketing. There's also money that goes toward training and connecting people. Essentially, all that means that my purchase for this piece brought $3.36 to a local troop, the website sending funds to the group.

If you've been to Aldi, you've no doubt noticed that there's a whole lot of unique items, like the quick to sell out Aldi Finds and a store fully stocked with private label brands that look (and often taste) like more popular brands you may be able to purchase at other stores. Benton is one of these brands, and Aldi is where you'll typically find the items.

Benton isn't just a Girl Scout cookie copycat. There are also Oreo copies, both in traditional Oreos and ones with vanilla cookies. Benton's is also responsible for cookies similar to Nilla Wafers, Fig Newtons, and Chips Ahoy, among many other cookie brands. Basically, if it's a cookie sold by Aldi, and it isn't a name brand, the private label on the container is Benton's. Flavor might be different in some cases between Benton's flavors, but perhaps an even bigger difference is price. It also might be a great alternative if you are concerned about the Girl Scout cookies facing a lawsuit for controversial contaminants and want an alternative.

One of the biggest stories here is the substantial difference in price. My four Girl Scout cookie boxes (for a total of 81 cookies) cost $24, just shy of thirty cents per cookie. My Aldi cookies (totaling 99 cookies) were less than half that price at $10.18, costing about a dime per cookie.

In terms of availability, Benton's cookies are largely available with a trip to Aldi as one of the store's private labels. Girl Scout cookies, on the other hand, can be a little harder to track down. Cookies season is generally from January to April, with your local troops selling cookies outside of grocery stores and other retailers. You can also order them online, which is where I ordered mine since there were no troops selling nearby me.

Of all the Girl Scout cookies, Caramel deLites have one of the more iconic looks. Even if it's a crowd-favorite Girl Scout cookie Giada De Laurentiis doesn't like, it even has its own alias when produced by Little Brownie Bakers: Samoas. The bottom of the cookie is a layer of chocolate that extends over the caramel and coconut coating. Across the top, the chocolate stripes give this cookie its fun look. You see one of these cookies, and you know that it's a Girl Scout Caramel deLites cookie, even if several brands have alternative options.

Biting into it, the cookie is softer than I expected it to be. With the caramel coating, it looked like something of a toffee, but it was much softer than that. There was very little chocolate flavor, even though chocolate coats the bottom and even crossed over top. Rather, the chocolate was more of an accent than anything else. Instead, I got a lot of flavor from the caramel and coconut. As I continued through the cookie, I noticed that the coconut offered something of a texture experience.

Nutritionally, Caramel deLites are fairly similar to Benton's caramel coconut fudge cookies. Per two cookie serving sizes, the Caramel deLites have two more calories than Benton's cookies at 140 calories and one more gram of fat at 7 grams.

The Girl Scout cookies are rather iconic in appearance, but the Benton's caramel coconut fudge cookies look exactly the same. In fact, looking at them side-by-side, you would struggle to identify which one came from Girl Scout troops and which one you picked off the shelf at Aldi.

While the cookies looked almost exactly the same, the flavor was a little different between the two. I found that Benton's cookie was just as soft as the Girl Scout cookie, and the coconut behaved similarly with each bite. However, the Benton variety tasted a little more like a simple biscuit than the Girl Scout cookie. That is, it had less flavor. In general, I don't find the Caramel deLites to be absolutely bursting with flavor, so even less of it was disappointing.

In addition to the similarities between nutritional information, there was a whole lot of overlap of the two different brands of cookies' ingredients. One difference was that Benton's caramel coconut fudge cookies used high fructose corn syrup, but the Caramel deLites did not have this ingredient.

Growing up, Peanut Butter Patties were my favorite cookie. Called Peanut Butter Patties or Tagalongs, depending on your baker, this is a crispy style cookie with peanut butter on top. It's then coated in chocolate. Since I was doing this tasting after the heyday of cookie season for the year, I needed to order my cookies online rather than have them delivered by Girl Scout. As a result, and through the shipping process, the Peanut Butter Patties were one of the cookies that melted a little in their packaging. While this didn't impact the flavor or texture in any sort of significant way, it did impact the appearance, so I relied on my memories of what Peanut Butter Patties looked like for this comparison.

The Girl Scout Peanut Butter Patties had an ultra soft bite to them. It was an enjoyable mix of peanut butter and chocolate. I have never noticed quite how small in size these cookies are until I saw them side by side with Benton's. Of course, they seem to be sized to be easy to eat, but they also felt rather smaller than they should be. The size difference is reflected right in the nutritional information. Girl Scout's peanut butter patties are 30 calories lighter than Aldi's offering at 130 calories, and it's also lighter in fat by two grams at 7 grams. At 25 grams for a serving size, the cookie serving is also smaller compared to Aldi's, which is 30 grams per serving.

Of all the cookies I sampled for the tasting, I was most interested in these, because they seem to look the closest to the actual Girl Scout offering. Both cookies are completely covered in chocolate, enclosing a crunch cookie with peanut butter on top. It's like Girl Scout's take on a Reese's peanut butter cup. I must say, in flavor, the two cookies are nearly identical.

In fact, to make sure I wasn't swayed by the partially melted cookies, I had my husband help me in a blind tasting of each cookie. I literally kept my eyes closed to taste it, and he handed it to me so it was an actual blind tasting. In this way, I discovered that Benton's had an even softer bite than the Girl Scout cookie. Not overly soft, it had a pleasing texture and improvement on the original. With my eyes closed, however, I can tell you that the flavor profile remains almost identical. It makes sense, then, that the ingredients listing was almost the same. In fact, looking at the ingredients, the only difference that felt significant in any respect is that Benton's cookies use artificial flavor while the Girl Scout cookies use natural and artificial flavor.

Thin Mints are sort of legendary around my house as my husband's absolute favorite cookie. In fact, we've been known to purchase several boxes at a time. I've even had a Girl Scout say, "Oh my goodness!" with a big old grin when I asked for somewhere around six boxes. Needless to say, I'm pretty familiar with this one, and we're far from the only ones. Thin Mints are so popular, in fact, that there are ice cream sprinkles, Jell-O, and even whipped cream versions of the flavor.

Thin Mints have a melt in your mouth feel with a whole bunch of chocolate cozying up to the taste of mint. You get the chocolate cookie with a chocolate and minty coating. There was certainly chocolate and mint flavor in equal measure, but after comparing them to the Benton's cookies, I was surprised at just how equal in measure the flavors were. These cookies were also pretty small, something I had taken for granted before. They're made to be very poppable and easy to consume. This is also different from Benton's.

The very first thing you'll notice about the Benton's striped shortbread cookies is that they look completely different from Thin Mints. Like the caramel coconut fudge cookies, they have stripes across them. The design is light green and chocolate, and it felt like the perfect decoration for a cookie that specializes in a mixture of chocolate and minty flavors.

While these cookies are bigger than thin mints, they also have a slightly different flavor. Rather than being both equally chocolate and mint, Benton's had more of a minty refreshing flavor. The chocolate is still there, but it wasn't quite as present. Between the two cookies, this was my favorite flavor. I liked the extra mint throughout, but I thought the chocolate did a nice job of balancing it too. However, because these were bigger, it made them a little less easy to snack on. It was much more difficult to mindlessly pop one cookie after another, and for some, that might be a huge benefit. But my husband and I both preferred the texture and feel of the smaller cookie from Girl Scouts, even if we agree that the flavor with Benton's is better.

Perhaps the least exciting of any of the Girl Scout cookies I tried was the peanut butter sandwich, also called Do-si-dos when made by Little Brownie Bakers. Admittedly, this was never a cookie I had ordered before, so I was ready to give it a fair shake. It's a cookie sandwich with oatmeal cookie wafers surrounding peanut butter. While I do love oatmeal cookies, they really need to be moist to be tasty, and that's far from these cookies. I found them too dry and not crave-worthy in really any respect. It almost reminded me of a dry toast as opposed to one with butter, jelly, or peanut butter.

For the main attraction being peanut butter, the cookie had very little actual peanut butter flavor. This should be the part that helps add a little bit of moisture to the cookie, but its lack of any substantial amount really keeps that from happening at all.

Like the peanut butter sandwiches from Girl Scouts, I wasn't terribly excited initially about these cookies. But then, I bit into one. I must say that these are closer to Nutter Butters than they are the Girl Scouts' peanut butter sandwiches.

The peanut butter and cookie in general, have a much sweeter flavor to it, which is part of what makes it closer to a Nutter Butter than the Girl Scout peanut butter sandwich. The decoration on the outside of the cookie has more of that cross hatch look that you get from a peanut butter style cookie made fresh at home. This is a nice touch, and it's certainly more attractive than the outside of the peanut butter sandwich cookie sold by Girl Scouts.

The question of worth here is very difficult. I want to make it very clear that I am not judging these cookies on anything more than what you get in the box. That is, I am setting aside all of the good that Girl Scouts does for young women going through adolescence. All of that work is incredibly powerful and worth donating to through cookie purchases. Instead, my verdict on whether these cookies are worth the lower price is based strictly on the quality of the cookies compared to the Girl Scout ones and what you're paying for in the cookies themselves.

Simply stated, the Benton's cookies were great. For what you're actually paying for, these cookies by Benton's are outstanding. These copycats are more than worth their monetary value, and often offer a whole lot more in flavor and even substance than the other cookies. In this way, yes, these cookies are worth the lower price. Not to mention, in most all instances, the cookies had a much nicer design to them than the Girl Scout offerings.

To compare Benton's cookies to Girl Scouts, I set aside the fundraising Girl Scouts due for the organization for the purchase of cookies and instead focused on the price of the two brands of cookies and how their flavors and texture compare. Obviously, all cookies taste good, but when comparing the two, I look to see which one tasted better. For texture, I compared both brands to determine which texture I preferred.

Ultimately, I also took into consideration the price of the cookies and how much you were actually getting with each container. In the end, I found some great cookies that will work just as well as Girl Scout cookies if you're looking for ice cream pairings to up your milkshake game, for example.