’80s snacks we wish they’d bring back to grocery store shelves
Nobody sat down in 1987 and thought: I should enjoy this Jell-O Pudding Pop more consciously because it will be gone in fifteen years and nothing will replace it. That is not how it works with snacks. You eat them, they’re there, and then one day you’re in a grocery store and you reach for the spot where the thing used to be and there’s something else there, something that is not the thing, and you understand for the first time that it is gone. The 1980s left more of those spots than any other decade.
Jell-O Pudding Pops
The chocolate version was not ice cream (we all knew it); it was frozen pudding, denser and more intensely flavored, producing a completely different sensation than anything currently in the frozen aisle. Mental Floss documents the business logic: too expensive to produce profitably, so Jell-O licensed the name to Popsicle in 2004, which changed the formula, producing something fans immediately identified as wrong, and it was discontinued in the early 2010s. Three decisions. One original pudding pop, gone. The name survived. The thing the name referred to did not.
Planters Cheez Balls
The canister mattered. The specific cylindrical container with the yellow lid was part of the experience in a way a bag never would have been, and Planters understood this and discontinued it anyway in 2006. Mental Floss reported that Planters ran a limited edition in 2018 through Walmart and Amazon. People bought them. The run ended. The petition is probably still there.
Squeeze-It
A drink inside a plastic bottle shaped like a cartoon character that you squeezed to consume, and the squeezing was genuinely half the appeal, and the drink itself bore approximately the same relationship to actual fruit as a highlighter bears to sunlight. Mental Floss’s coverage of childhood snacks documents the era’s willingness to make the container the selling point. Nothing operating on the same logical premises has even tried to replace it.
Bonkers candy
Mid-chew, a completely different flavor arrived from somewhere inside the candy you had not been warned about. This was marketed as a feature. In retrospect, it was also a fairly accurate metaphor for what the 1980s did to its consumers generally. Mental Floss’s archive documents Bonkers as a defining example of the era’s flavor ambush marketing category. It has come back periodically in discount stores. The ambush doesn’t hit the same way when you’re expecting it.
Pudding Roll-Ups
Flat. Rollable. Solidified pudding in a sheet format, consumed in approximately forty-five seconds by any child who encountered one, discontinued at a point nobody bothered to document precisely. The collective memory lives primarily in people who ate them after school in 1987 and have never been able to adequately describe them to anyone born after 1990.
Choco Taco
It’s 1983. You are delighted having a vanilla ice cream, fudge, a waffle cone taco shell, peanuts, and chocolate. All that gone in 2022 when Klondike simplified its product line after nearly four decades, which is what food companies call it when they discontinue something beloved. Mental Floss documents that Klondike said it hoped to bring it back someday without specifying when. That is the food-industry version of “we’ll see,” which probably means no.
The bottom line
The 1980s food industry tried things that didn’t work and occasionally produced something that worked so well the decision to discontinue it still doesn’t make sense thirty years later. Some shelves have never quite recovered. Neither have some people.
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