Absolutely honored to be the one to bring you the scoop on cookie butter, a product that’s only been on the market since checks notes 2010!
Oh. I see. It’s been around for a while. And it was a mid-tier hype ingredient for a while, appearing in everything from Krispy Kreme doughnuts to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to Starbucks coffee, too. Well, shucks.
So you already know about cookie butter. What if I educated you about its origins, instead? THAT’S RIGHT BITCHES IT’S TIME TO LEARN!
Biscoff cookies have been around in Belgium since 1932. There, they’re generically known as speculoos, but Lotus Foods renamed the product for its American consumers, because Americans have always hated stupid names. Instead they decided to call them Biscoff, a portmanteau of biscuits and coffee, which is obviously less stupid. All Biscoff are speculoos but not all speculoos are Biscoff, got it?
For once, capitalism worked in my favor, as I may have never gotten to taste Lotus Biscoff Cookie Butter without a “food broker” working for Delta Airlines who decided he wanted the Belgian cookies served on flights in 1986. Don’t say a food broker never did anything good for ya.
So now we’ve got Biscoff cookies flying all around the world, enchanting American passengers and priming the market. But how did we get to spreadable cookie deliciousness?
In 2010, a contestant on the Belgian television cooking competition De Bedenkers grabbed first place with her cookie butter recipe. Moms had long been making snacks out of crushed up speculoos in between slices of buttered bread, but after the show win, Lotus Foods swooped in and bought the exclusive rights to the recipe.
Of course, Lotus then tried to act like they’d invented mangling together cookies and butter, suing another De Bedenkers contestant who had also made a cookie spread and tangling with other speculoos bakeries. Even the writer of the blog OmaWapsie, which literally translates into “Grandma’s Blog”, wasn’t safe from the Lotus bullies. That’s right, they went after grandma.
As everyone knows, if you come after grandma, you best not miss. Turns out she’d published the recipe before any of these other fools even dreamed of being on television, and Lotus’s lawsuits fell apart.
By that time, Trader Joe’s had already introduced its wildly popular Speculoos Cookie Butter, which is probably the brand America is most familiar with today. In fact, it was the most popular product that Trader Joe’s sold in 2014.
But while Trader Joe’s puts its cookie butter front and center, the (somewhat) original Lotus Biscoff Cookie Butter sits quietly on shelves next to the peanut butter, its unassuming label easily blending into the sea of savory counterparts.
This is where I found my first jar, as I decided which peanut butter brand I wanted to take home with me for the apocalypse. Suddenly this sweet, mysterious-to-me treat caught my eye.
Before researching this article, it had never occurred to me that TJ’s Speculoos and Biscoff were practically the same thing under different names. But now that I understand the Biscoff/speculoos relationship, I’m glad that Lotus’s offering exists since I don’t live near a TJ’s and I now cannot imagine my life without cookie butter.
Again, I’m sure all of you are more worldly than me and have already experienced the bliss that is cookie butter, so I’ll be brief in my description. My first impression upon tasting the Biscoff variety was the familiar taste of cinnamon graham crackers. It’s a taste I haven’t had in many years, so my taste buds were flooded with nostalgia.
It’s like a warm, creamy hug that you can spread on anything you want. Like peanut butter, it doesn’t need to be refrigerated, which I think is great because I feel like that warm feeling would be diminished by a cold temperature. Also, you can just yoink it off the shelf, plunk yourself down on the couch with a spoon, and go hog wild, which is my preferred method of consumption.
It took me a whole decade to try cookie butter, but now that I have, it’s going to be a staple in my pantry. It’s just that good.
DENOUMENT
According to Delta Airlines flight attendants, if you take a slice of lime from the beverage cart and squeeze it over a Biscoff cookie, it tastes just like key lime pie. Please give these workers some real food.
Oma Wapsie received a gift basket from Lotus Foods for her troubles. She has received no further compensation for her recipe.
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