So far, Girl Scout cookie sales are down from prior years, but it’s not because people don’t love cookies.

“People still want the cookies,” Dee Detonnancourt said Saturday after loading her car with cases of cookies from the Paul Arpin Van Lines warehouse in West Warwick.

Detonnancourt said her Coventry troop sold about a quarter the number of cookies they did last year. Cutting into sales with the pandemic has been the ability of the girls to walk neighborhoods and take orders at school. Also, restrictions have put a dent on sales outside storefronts and at shopping centers.

“We went conservative,” said Ginger Lallo, senior director of advancement for Girl Scouts of Southeastern New England. She said the district ordered 33,000 cases of cookies – that’s 396,000 boxes – with the thought that if orders pick up, additional orders can be placed. Last year, the district ordered 54,000 cases. Then came the COVID-19 shutdown in March. Cookie sales came to a halt. The district had a surplus of more than 5,000 cases.

Lallo didn’t let them go to waste. She saw an opportunity to help those who were on the frontline of fighting the pandemic. Cases of cookies were donated to the staff at Kent Hospital and first responders.

Lallo is ready to make additional orders on hopes of more sales.

Troop 16 Cranston sisters Adrianna and Alyssa Insana report that the Thin Mints and Caramel deLites are favorites, although there’s a new cookie this year – the Toast-Yay. Lallo describes it like a French toast cookie, a shortbread with a maple syrup flavor. Boxes are still $5.

Adrianna and Alyssa’s mother, Judy, expects troop sales that totaled 3,000 boxes last year to be down.

“It’s a little harder. No so much door-to-door,” she said. The pandemic has likewise altered troop activities. The troop has been meeting on Zoom and participated in a robotics program as well as cooking lessons.

“We had a Santa Zoom,” she said.

Lallo said the district is moving ahead with its summer day camp with the hope that many of the pandemic restrictions now in place will have been lifted and people will have been vaccinated.

While cases of cookies reach upward in the Arpin warehouse, Wendy Blackwood of Aprin, who has worked the cookie distribution for at least five years, says it’s not the same this year. She remembers the wall of cookies extending deep within the warehouse. Nonetheless, it was still a squeeze for many to fit all the cookies they had sold into the car.

Judy Isana and her daughters packed 48 cases into their car. There were boxes in the front and back passenger seats. The girls wouldn’t be left behind. They wedged themselves in between the cases.

Troops are scheduled to make their pickups throughout this week.