60 free Cookie trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
53 free Cookie trivia questions with answers. Cookies are the rare food with a holiday, a Muppet, a court case and a piece of internet plumbing named after them, so there is plenty to ask. This quiz covers the American classics (Toll House, Oreo, Fig Newtons, Nilla wafers, Girl Scout cookies, Famous Amos, Mrs. Fields, Keebler) and the world's biscuits (Tim Tams, digestives, biscotti, macarons, alfajores, stroopwafels, Marie and rich tea), plus the odd corners: fortune cookies, Cookie Monster's real name, browser cookies, and the largest cookie ever baked. It runs from easy to genuinely obscure and shows a difficulty rating on each question, so it works solo, at a bake sale, or as a food round on quiz night. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia, Guinness World Records or the relevant primary source, and each question carries its citation.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ruth Wakefield created the chocolate chip cookie at her Toll House Inn in which US state?
Massachusetts
The inn stood in Whitman, in a building that had allegedly served as a toll house as early as 1709. The state made the chocolate chip cookie its official cookie in 1997.
Q 02Along with a $1 payment, what did Ruth Wakefield receive from Nestlé for the rights to print her recipe?
A lifetime supply of chocolate
The deal also included a consulting role. Nestlé's morsels ended up carrying her Toll House recipe on the packaging for decades.
Q 03What name did Nestlé give the small tear-shaped chocolate pieces it started selling in 1940?
Morsels
The year before, Nestlé had been selling chocolate bars pre-scored into 160 segments so bakers could break them up for the recipe.
Q 04Contrary to the popular myth, how did Ruth Wakefield say her chocolate chip cookie came about?
She invented it deliberately
The 'happy accident' story has been repeated for decades, but Wakefield, a trained home economics teacher and dietitian, insisted the recipe was worked out on purpose.
Q 05Oreo was launched in 1912 as an imitation of which earlier cream-filled sandwich cookie?
Hydrox
The original had been on shelves since 1908, but the copy became the world's best-selling cookie brand while the original faded, was discontinued in 1999 and only revived in 2015.
Q 06The very first Oreo was sold on March 6, 1912 to a grocer in which city?
Hoboken, New Jersey
The cookies themselves were made across the river at Nabisco's Chelsea factory in Manhattan; that block of Ninth Avenue was later ceremonially named Oreo Way.
Q 07The Double Stuf Oreo, with roughly twice the usual crème, went on sale in which year?
1974
The same year, the product was renamed the Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookie. Golden Oreo, with vanilla wafers, did not arrive until 2004.
Q 08What early-1990s change to the Oreo filling made it possible for the cookie to become kosher-certified?
Replacing lard with vegetable oil
The switch was driven by health concerns, but the side effect was that Oreo could finally win over kosher households that had stuck with its rival.
Q 09The first known Girl Scout cookie sale, by the Mistletoe Troop in 1917, was in which state?
Oklahoma
The Muskogee troop sold home-baked cookies at their local high school. Commercial bakers were not licensed until 1936.
Q 10With wartime shortages of flour, sugar and butter, what did Girl Scouts sell instead during WWII?
Calendars
By the 1950s the lineup had grown to include Shortbreads and Savannahs, with six varieties on sale nationwide by 1956.
Q 11Which is the best-selling Girl Scout Cookie?
Thin Mints
In an average January-to-April season, more than a million girls sell over 200 million packages and raise more than $800 million.
Q 12How many boxes did Lilly Bumpus sell in 2021 to set the individual Girl Scout cookie record?
32,484
That is roughly a tractor-trailer's worth of cookies sold by one girl in a single season.
Q 13A cookie much like the modern fortune cookie was made in which Japanese city as early as the 1800s?
Kyoto
The Japanese version, tsujiura senbei, is larger and darker and flavoured with miso and sesame rather than vanilla and butter.
Q 21Pepperidge Farm's Milano evolved from which earlier single-wafer cookie topped with dark chocolate?
The Naples
Founder Margaret Rudkin found the inspiration on a 1950s trip to Europe. She had named her company after the pepperidge tree on her Fairfield, Connecticut farm.
Q 22Which two singers put up the $25,000 for the first Famous Amos store on Sunset Boulevard in 1975?
Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy
Amos had been a talent agent at William Morris, and the store's opening was a Hollywood-style party. The brand now belongs to Ferrero.
Q 23Debbi Fields opened the first Mrs. Fields cookie store in 1977 in which California city?
Palo Alto
Q 14In 1983, San Francisco's Court of Historical Review credited the American fortune cookie to whom?
Makoto Hagiwara
Hagiwara ran Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden. Los Angeles noodle maker David Jung had a competing claim dating to 1918, and the judge, being from San Francisco, was hardly neutral.
Q 15Wonton Food, the world's largest fortune cookie manufacturer, is headquartered where?
Brooklyn, New York
Around 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year worldwide, most of them eaten in the United States rather than China.
Q 16In 2005, 110 Powerball players won about $19 million after playing 'lucky numbers' printed where?
On fortune cookie slips
Authorities briefly investigated the manufacturer before concluding nothing untoward had happened; the numbers had simply been printed on a huge run of fortunes.
Q 17The Newton cookie, in mass production since 1891, was named after a suburb of which city?
Boston
Plant manager James Hazen picked the name; the recipe came from Philadelphia baker Charles Roser, who probably borrowed the idea from the British fig roll. 'Fig' was dropped from the name in 2012.
Q 18What did James Henry Mitchell's machine make possible for the Newton cookie?
Extruding jam and dough together
The device pushed a continuous tube of dough around a core of fig jam, which was then cut into pieces, a technique still used for filled bars today.
Q 19By the 1940s Nabisco was printing a recipe for which Southern dessert on its Vanilla Wafers box?
Banana pudding
The wafers had been sold since 1898; the name was shortened to Nilla in 1967, and since at least 1994 they have been flavoured mainly with synthetic vanillin.
Q 20The 1902 Barnum's Animals cracker box came with a string attached; what was it for?
Hanging it on a Christmas tree
The circus-wagon box was a Christmas-season design that stuck. Since 1902, 53 different animals have appeared as crackers.
The chain grew fast enough that by the mid-1980s a fake 'secret recipe' was circulating in the mail, complete with a story about it costing $250.
Q 24The 1980s chain-letter Mrs. Fields 'secret recipe' claimed it was bought from a store for how much?
$250
The story was lifted from an older urban legend attached to Neiman Marcus cookies and the Waldorf-Astoria's red velvet cake.
Q 25What is the first name of the head elf who runs the Keebler Hollow Tree factory?
Ernie
Ernest J. Keebler became head elf in 1970, two years after the Leo Burnett agency dreamed up the Hollow Tree for its commercials.
Q 26In 2019, Kellogg sold Keebler and its other cookie brands for $1.3 billion to which company?
Ferrero
The Italian Nutella maker completed the deal on July 29, 2019, taking Famous Amos and Mother's Cookies along with the elves.
Q 27Chips Ahoy!, the third best-selling US cookie of the early 2020s, debuted in which year?
1963
In the early 2020s the brand averaged around $619 million a year in US sales, behind only Oreo and its stablemate.
Q 28The Biscoff brand name is a blend of which two English words?
Biscuit and coffee
Lotus launched the name in 1986, a few years after airlines began handing the caramelised speculoos out as in-flight treats.
Q 29Why did coconut macaroons become a popular Passover treat?
They contain no flour or leaven
Beaten egg whites do the rising. The name is borrowed from French macaron and ultimately from Sicilian maccarone, the same root as macaroni.
Q 30The two Carmelite nuns who sold macarons to survive the French Revolution became the Macaron Sisters of which city?
Nancy
The double-decker filled macaron familiar today came much later; Ladurée's Pierre Desfontaines and rival baker Claude Gerbet both claimed to have invented it in the early 20th century.