Hundreds of people descended onto Vestal Parkway this week for the grand opening of its new Crumbl Cookies store.

Located right across the street from the Town Square Mall, the location launched its business with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday as a “soft opening” before the official grand opening on Friday. Local elected officials were also in attendance at the ceremony, including Broome County Executive Jason Garnar ‘99 and a representative from State Sen. Lea Webb’s ‘04 office.

In 2021, Jigar Gandhi, who owns the Vestal Crumbl store, opened his first location in Rochester — the first of its kind in New York state. Since then, Gandhi has opened six locations throughout the state, with Vestal location being his seventh.

“Since we started the construction here and since we had our sign board up here for Crumbl, people were just coming and checking us, when we are opening [because] they cannot wait anymore and they just wanted to push as hard as we can and open soon,” Gandhi said at a press conference on Thursday during the soft opening. “So it’s unbelievable that people will be checking on us. They’ve been calling us and now, finally, we are open. We are excited and that community and everybody’s excited around us.”

Next to Crumbl is the newly opened Tropical Smoothie Cafe, which also celebrated its opening at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Saumil Dalal, co-owner of Tropical Smoothie, discussed the new store in an interview with Pipe Dream and said he hoped the store would be popular among all age groups.

The Vestal location is his fourth cafe and Dalal said he wants to expand further in Ithaca and across the Southern Tier.

Many students were excited to grab cookies from the new Crumbl store. On Friday at 8 a.m., the store’s official opening day, the line outside the Crumbl store stretched past Starbucks. The first 100 customers received a free t-shirt and sticker, and all who stopped in on Friday received a free chocolate chip cookie and could enter a raffle where they could potentially win free cookies for the entire year.

“So with Crumbl, the reason why we are part of this business is [because] it brings smiles on everybody’s face,” Gandhi said. “It is to celebrate, to treat and spread happiness [with] a pink box around friends and family. So that is the reason we got into this business and we thought this happiness should spread across the U.S., across every town of the U.S. as well and that’s the reason we ended up coming here.”