88 Years After Ruth Wakefield Created The Chocolate Chip Cookie At The Toll House Inn In Whitman, Massachusetts, Nestlé Toll House Is Selling Its First Advent Calendar, And It Is Shaped Like The Inn
Nestlé Toll House announced its first Advent calendar on October 5, 2026. It is a house-shaped box with 12 numbered doors, and behind each one is a package of cookie dough or baking morsels. The calendar costs $29.99 and is sold online only, in three limited sales. The first opens Friday, October 9, at 2 p.m. Eastern.
The inn behind the box
Nestlé says the calendar’s shape is inspired by the original Toll House Inn. That was a real restaurant. Ruth Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, bought a house on Route 18 in Whitman, Massachusetts, in August 1930 and opened it as the Toll House, according to a Saturday Evening Post history of Wakefield published in 2025.
In 1938, Wakefield added pieces of Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate to a cookie and called it the Chocolate Crunch Cookie. It was no accident. She had been serving a butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream and wanted to give her guests something different, she said in a 1974 newspaper interview that Sporked quoted in its 2023 history of the cookie.
Nestlé noticed. The company got the right to use her recipe and the Toll House name, and Wakefield got free chocolate for life, the Saturday Evening Post reports. Nestlé printed the recipe on its packaging, where it still runs. The inn itself burned down on New Year’s Eve 1984 and was not rebuilt.
What is behind the 12 doors
Two of the 12 products are new, Nestlé’s announcement says:
- Snowflake Morsels: baking morsels shaped like snowflakes, for mixing into dough or scattering on top of cookies, brownies and bark.
- Snowflake Cookie Dough: refrigerated sugar cookie dough with the snowflake morsels in it. Allrecipes describes it as slice-and-bake. A from-scratch base for the same idea is our Soft and Chewy Sugar Cookies, made with melted butter and brown sugar and rolled in sugar.
The other ten are products Toll House already sells. Five are refrigerated doughs:
- Santa’s Cookie Dough
- Peppermint Cocoa Cookie Dough. Our Double Chocolate Hot Cocoa Cookies cover the cocoa half, with two kinds of chocolate chips and mini marshmallows on top. They have no peppermint.
- Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. Our own Chocolate Chip Cookies use both semi-sweet and milk chocolate chips.
- Holiday Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
- Chocolate Chip Remix Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. Ours is these Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies, with rolled oats and semi-sweet and dark chips.
Five are bags of morsels:
- Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels
- Milk Chocolate Mini Morsels
- Dark Chocolate Morsels
- Butterscotch Morsels. Melted butterscotch chips go into the dough of our Butterscotch Pecan Cookies.
- Milk Chocolatey Flavored Football Morsels
Allrecipes reports that the box stands nearly two feet tall and that the products inside are full-sized. The numbered doors double as holiday cards, according to Nestlé. The mix gives bakers “all the ingredients to count down the season,” Melanie Knoke, a senior marketing manager at Nestlé Toll House, said in the announcement.
How to buy one
The calendar is sold only at tollhouse.com/adventcalendar, at 2 p.m. Eastern on three Fridays:
- October 9, 2026
- November 6, 2026
- December 4, 2026, which is National Cookie Day
Nestlé says quantities are limited and each sale lasts while supplies do. Its announcement gives no number.
The store page adds the details that matter at checkout. Overnight shipping is included in the $29.99. The calendar ships only within the contiguous United States, and the limit is one per order and per household.
It does not ship right away. Orders from the October 9 sale go out about three weeks after purchase, the store page says, which points to the end of October. Orders from the November 6 and December 4 sales go out about one week after purchase.
The dough is the reason for the overnight shipping. The calendar arrives with a refrigerated inner box, and Nestlé’s instructions are to take the doughs and morsels out promptly, keep the doughs in the refrigerator until their day comes, and store the morsels somewhere cool and dry.
Nestlé Toll House showed the calendar on its Instagram account on October 5.
View this post from Nestlé Toll House (@nestletollhouse) on Instagram
