Is Crumbl falling apart? Yes, it is

‘Terrible.’ ‘Zero out of 10.’ The billion-dollar cookie company, once America’s fastest-growing chain, is making fans queasy. Yet its true innovations will live on. Perhaps by now you have seen, somewhere on social media, a drink made by Crumbl that half the internet seems convinced could be a biohazard.Called the Crazy Cousins, it mixes a base like Sprite or Mountain Dew with a full can of Red Bull, strawberry purée, pineapple syrup, and a serious glug of coconut milk. The 32-ounce version delivers 186 grams of slurpable sugar.“Almost half a pound of sugar, or five cans of Coke” is how Itay Shechter, a wellness influencer with more than a million followers, explained it in a post that went viral. “I had to stop everything and go make that video,” Shechter told me last week. “My job is making a number like that impossible to scroll past.”Physician Mark Hyman declared it “the equivalent of eating 19 Krispy Kreme donuts” and said it “should be illegal.” Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer joked that he’d stir in Ketel One. The betting app Polymarket got creative—“JUST IN: Crumbl cookie company releases drink with 186,000mg of sugar,” making it sound even more like a toxic threat.A drink containing nearly four times the recommended daily limit of sugar might seem like reaching rock bottom for Crumbl. But in the eight-year-old Utah company’s push beyond cookies into the colorful parade of turbocharged sweets it’s rolled out lately, betting that it can’t go any lower may be premature.  Somewhere between the following drops . . .