Brown Butter Pecan Chessmen Cookies Are Only at Walmart, and We Tried Them

Pepperidge Farm makes a mean cookie. We would know; we review them all the time! Until recently, we pretty much exclusively covered Milano cookies, for one simple reason: Pepperidge Farm makes a ton of Milano variants! From Mango to Chai Latte and more, those elevated oblong sandwich cookies lend themselves to flavor swaps as easily as Oreo.

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Meanwhile, the humble Chessmen cookie sat on the shelves, watching all these fancy-flavored Milano cookies come and go. “When’s it going to be my time?” Those cookie prayers were answered two months ago with the reveal of three new flavored Chessmen variants—one of which is exclusive to Walmart! How exclusive are these cookies? Pepperidge Farm couldn’t even send us a bag. I bought these Brown Butter Pecan Chessmen myself with cold hard cash plastic; let’s see if they’re worth the hunt.

New Chessmen Cookies!

Pepperidge Farm Brown Butter Pecan Chessmen Cookies: Review

Pros: The baked-pecan flavor in the Brown Butter Pecan Chessmen is so accurate that halfway through my first bite, I was confused when the texture was “crisp cookie” rather than “fistful of nuts.” Any cookie that confuses my mouth because it’s so accurate gets two thumbs up from me. These Brown Butter Pecan Chessmen cookies are subtle, smooth, and smell so much like pecan pie that I’d like to see them turned into a crust for a pecan pie.

Cons: The base Chessmen cookie is already buttery, so the brown butter flavor isn’t doing anything particularly groundbreaking. These pecan cookies have some great potential applications in baking, but I’m not sure how many I could eat in a row before being bored to death.

Credit: Griffin Parker / Walmart

Rating:

10/10

Sporks

Will Pepperidge Farm make any more flavored Chessmen cookies?

I sure hope so. To date, we’ve only been blessed with a handful of Chessmen variants. These Brown Butter Pecan Chessmen cookies were released in January alongside Salted Caramel and Cinnamon Sugar variants. The very first Chessmen variant is actually the subject of some controversy… according to me and no one else. I wrote up that cookie conspiracy in my initial news piece covering that trio of new Chessmen from earlier this year.

I didn’t beat down anyone’s door for answers, but Pepperidge Farm actually reached out afterwards, of their own accord, to clarify those points of contention. Per the brand, the seasonal Holiday Nog cookies are Chessmen cookies despite not being labeled as such; this new trio is the first-ever permanent expansion of the Chessmen concept. I’ll give them plenty of credit for humoring a writer who genuinely used the phrase “cookie conspiracy.”