The Canned Product That Pioneered Non-Refrigerated Cookie Dough

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While your go-to associations with the 1970s may be disco, denim, and decor in shades of avocado green, you might leave out one important aspect of '70s culture: Convenience food. As working mothers became more commonplace, so did foods like TV dinners and frozen meals. With Mom at the office all day, there were no more homemade cookies waiting for kids after school. Luckily, Betty Crocker came to the rescue with a surprising hack that made making cookies a breeze: Betty Crocker Spoon & Bake Cookie Dough.

Introduced in 1975, the product sported the tagline, "Now you're just a spoon away from the cookies you love whenever you like." Unlike most pre-made cookie doughs you buy at the grocery store, no refrigeration was required for Betty Crocker's Spoon & Bake. You simply stored it in your cabinet and spooned it out onto a baking pan. Each container made three dozen cookies and offered three flavors: Oatmeal raisin, peanut butter, and, perhaps most notably, not chocolate chip but chocolate-flavored chip.

So, how was non-refrigerated cookie dough possible? The answer may be lost to time. General Mills, Betty Crocker's parent company, filed a 1973 patent related to shelf-stable dough. The patent specified it was designed for "pie crust, tarts, puff paste, cream puffs, and strudel," so it's unclear whether it was ever used for Spoon & Bake cookies. However, it's possible the underlying science was similar. The patent claimed that over-reliance on corn sugars and glycerine in previous shelf-stable products yielded a sour, unpleasant taste. General Mills claimed they adjusted ratios appropriately to create a superior product.

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Did Spoon & Bake Cookie Dough rank among store-bought cookie doughs that taste homemade? That depends on who you ask, but probably not. The author of the Retroist blog claims their sisters tried Spoon & Bake Cookie Dough back in the day and gave the product lackluster reviews. Like many kids, the sisters preferred to eat the dough raw rather than bother with baking. They claimed the taste was decent, but it had an odd, unsatisfying texture.

There's little information out there about the actual quality of Spoon & Bake. However, many Reddit users express a great deal of skepticism over the dubious inclusion of chocolate-flavored chips. Like many convenience foods, it's possible the ingredients required to maintain a stable shelf life resulted in a subpar taste.

So, whatever happened to Spoon & Bake Cookie Dough? Given the lack of online nostalgia, we can infer the product was not terribly popular and never caught on as a store-bought cookie dough. There are no official reports on its discontinuation, but it was probably off the shelves by the early '80s.