The latest sweet treat trend to sweep the Garden City reveals a lot about our spending habits, writes Alex Casey. 

To consume a stuffed cookie is to unhinge one’s jaw like a snake attempting to swallow a deer. Often as tall as they are wide, the viral sweet treat towers over even the most indulgent cookies of old, filled to the gills with lava pockets of oozing Biscoff, Nutella, and pistachio spread, or secret chambers of Oreos, chunks of cake, bits of brownie. You’ll see them everywhere on social media, captured in positively pornographic close-ups of dripping decadence. 

With their origins in New York City’s Levain bakery in the 1990s, stuffed cookies have certainly made their ooey gooey presence known in Christchurch. The opening of Cookie Trader saw lines snaking up Cashel Street for weeks, with thousands of cookies sold every day. Within just a few minutes walk is Secret Bakers in Boxed Quarter, and Wooden Spoon Biscuits a few blocks over. There’s two more Wooden Spoons further afield at the malls, Bluemoon Bakehouse in Riccarton and brand new Sugar Gremlins online – all offering similarly gargantuan morsels. 

“There’s definitely a trend happening here,” says Daniel Malcolm, owner of Wooden Spoon Biscuits. “When you’ve got all these shops dedicated to selling stuffed cookies and we’re all pretty much five minutes away from each other, there must be something going on.” Taking over the business four years ago, which previously sold Italian cookies in jars, Malcolm noticed “the stuffed cookie revolution” on Instagram and TikTok and decided to “jump on the bandwagon”. 

The recipes took a while to perfect, but now he regularly sells 15-20 flavours of giant stuffed cookies at three locations across the city. “We’d seen how big it was overseas, but we didn’t know how receptive people would be to the price,” he says. But even at $7 a cookie, The Wooden Spoon frequently sells out of fan favourites Biscoff, red velvet and milk chocolate. “Minus the odd customer in the gold card community, we have no issues selling them.”

But the stuffed cookie invasion of Christchurch is just one wave in a tsunami of sweet treats sweeping the country. Aucklanders are queuing for Shibby’s frozen yoghurt, while Wellington has officially gone wild for desserts – something economist Shamubeel Eaqub can also attest to. “I was walking around the city, and it was really fascinating just how many of the brightly lit, well populated-places were these new funky cookie, yoghurt, or dessert places,” he says. 

Drawing from company registry data, Eaqub notes there has been a surge in sweet treat businesses (keywords such as ‘cookie’ ‘dessert’ ‘matcha’) popping up around the country since 2023. “Over the last few years, there certainly has been an uptick, and you can see that matcha, acai, and desserts seem like the fashionable thing at the moment,” he says. “I think it’s part of the wider trend of people still wanting a treat, even when we can’t afford anything else.” 

Eaqub explains that people tend to change their spending habits depending on the state of the economy. “Certainly during these more strained times, people do tend to prioritise those smaller, more affordable treats instead of, say, fine dining.” Malcolm at The Wooden Spoon has observed something similar. “Money’s a bit tighter for everyone nowadays,” he says. “You can’t splash out on your $100 bottle of perfume, but you can splash out on a $7 cookie.” 

As for where the trend might go next, Eaqub wouldn’t be surprised if many of these current food fads go the same way of freak shakes and cronuts. Still, there are positives to be found. “I think New Zealand is much faster at getting these things now than we used to be because of social media,” he says. “We’re also seeing this new form of entrepreneurship, which is people seeing that if you can fill a niche in the market, make money out of it and get joy out of it, why not?” 

Because chasing that fleeting sense of joy, even if it comes from a monstrous oozing cookie the size of a softball, makes sense in these trying times. “It’s about just getting a little bit of fun back into our lives, because everything is so fucking dire,” says Eaqub. “And if you can find a bit of enjoyment and a bit of fun in a sugary treat – go for it.”