From hard candies evoking nuclear warfare to cookies reimagined as a
part of your complete breakfast, these are the sweets, treats,
and quick bites that an All-Star like you can still smash in your mouth today.
The '90s saw an explosion of gummy fruit snacks with just enough natural fruit
ingredients to avoid being classified as pure candy. This allowed them to position
themselves as products that appealed to a kid's desire for bright colors and syrupy sweetness
and parents' fixation on getting their kids to eat healthy. While the more natural alternative
we know as "fruit leather" had already been around for some time, Fruit Roll-Ups blew the
doors open for a lot of the pectin-based fruit snacks we remember from the '90s.
Even though they were conceived as far back as the 1970s, General Mills admits that the
'90s were when Fruit Roll-Ups really exploded in popularity. After shifting
the treats to their Betty Crocker brand, and riding off the mascot marketing boom,
General Mills debuted the wizard character Rolupo in 1990. But by 1991 the character was retired and
Nickelodeon quickly entered into a licensing deal with General Mills, introducing peel-out shapes in
the form of characters from their popular animated shows. Fruit Roll-Ups, despite their controversy
over basically turning mashed, dried fruit into candy, have stayed on store shelves ever since.
"What fun Fruit Rolls Ups will we roll out with next?"
Hot off the heels of the Fruit Roll-Ups' boom, General Mills stretched its snack to
a three-foot-long strip and released it under its own name in 1991. Like its squarer cousin,
Fruit by the Foot hasn't once been discontinued since it first
appeared. Even the Berry Tie-Dye flavor is still around, with its swirling colors
introduced to capitalize on the '90s revival of the '60s counterculture fashion statement.
The popularity of the long variant of the original fruit snack made
confusion over the name fairly frequent. The thinner, longer,
ironically more rolled-up offering was frequently called a "fruit roll-up" by the average consumer,
ignoring the distinction between the sheet and strip forms. This quibble over names seems to have
extended even into the social media age, forcing the brand's own Twitter account to clarify:
"All Fruit by the Foot are fruit roll ups, but not all Fruit Roll Ups are Fruit by the Foot."
Even after their heyday, Fruit by the Foot isn't afraid to still get weird.
"I've replaced your bones with Fruit by the Foot."
"Indeed you have."
Goooze. Floam. Gak. If these words mean nothing to you, you were likely not a '90s kid,
or your parents really didn't want you playing with anything that would ruin their carpet. What
these '90s-era Nickelodeon-branded goopy toys demonstrate is that kids love slime, and Gushers
pack a tart, syrupy jet of fruity goo in every bite. While that may explain their staying power,
their aggressive advertising no doubt immediately earned them a captivated consumer base.
"Just because it goos, doesn't mean it's gush. GUSH."
The novelty of biting into a fruit gummy and getting a burst of sweet mystery goo
played no small part in the original Gushers ad campaign. The pitch was ecstatic body horror,
showing hip preteen actors hanging out, popping Gushers, and immediately being transformed into
grotesque fruit-headed creatures while having an absolutely tubular time. Gushers threw out all
concerns of being marketable to health-conscious parents with their bonkers commercials. However,
when the concern over kids' consumption of artificial sweeteners and colors grew too
strong in the 2010s, General Mills relented. Since 2017, the company has reportedly removed
all artificial colors and flavors from Fruit Roll-Ups, Fruit by the Foot, and Gushers.
Today, Bagel Bites' marketing jingle, cribbed from the 1957 pop single "Sugartime," still
echoes through the minds of kids who were watching Saturday morning cartoons between
the years of the Manuel Noriega trial and the release of "Pokémon: The First Movie."
"Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, pizza at suppertime."
The '90s saw the world discovering just how much pizza
could motivate children, with the continuation of Pizza Hut's "Book-It" program offering personal
pizzas in exchange for books read. The thickness of a miniaturized half-bagel
gave these tiny pizzas the foundation they needed to stay intact and be easily eaten
with one hand. They were quick, portable, and exciting to kids who saw the indulgence of a
pizza shrunk down into a convenience, complete with bacon bits-sized chunks of minced pepperoni.
Bagel Bites remain in grocery store freezers to this day. However,
2022 saw their discontinuation in Canada.
Totino's Pizza Rolls are the delicious result of corporate merging and acquisition. While
Rose Totino was building the take-home frozen pizza side of her Minneapolis pizzeria business,
Jeno Paulucci was combining Chinese egg roll casings with pizza filling. Pillsbury acquired
the Totino's frozen food company in 1975, then Paulucci's in 1985. A few years later,
Totino's name adorned boxes of Paulucci-style pizza rolls.
Totino's tries to market Pizza Rolls as a party food for fun social gatherings,
but the current cultural footprint of Totino's Pizza Rolls is steeped in dark,
ironic alt-comedy. Gonzo sketch comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim produced a Totino's
ad campaign in 2014, replete with absurdist digressions and discordant non-slogans.
"I am Pizza Totino's Boy."
Saturday Night Live made a whole series of parody Totino's ads that tied Pizza Rolls to everything
from cosmic horror, to feminine existential dread. '90s kids may have loved Pizza Rolls,
but as adults, they know there's just something off about them. Off-ally delicious, that is.
The TV dinner craze has crested and crashed, but ready-made frozen meals have never completely
disappeared. As long as the 40-hour work week persists, people will sometimes find
themselves unable to cook from scratch. The '70s saw an interesting variety of frozen offerings.
"Giblet gravy and sliced turkey!"
The '90s is when we got offerings like Kid Cuisine.
The typical Kid Cuisine packaging shows the brand's long-standing mascot, a penguin named KC,
on some adventure or engaged in any number of fun sports. That branding hasn't changed
the fact that giving your child a dress rehearsal for eating like a depressed
adult fails to appeal to most parents. On top of that, child nutrition watchdogs have
sounded the alarm over the volume of fat and salt found in the average frozen offering.
Kid Cuisine may have a 30-plus-year track record, but their product line has shrunk
to three choices of meal now, all centered around some kind of breaded processed meat,
with corn as their only vegetable on offer. It's anyone's guess how
much longer nostalgia or convenience as selling points will keep Kid Cuisine around.
Imagine this, if you will: a savory Oreo. In 1989, Nabisco set about to
make this fever dream a reality and ended up with the two flagship flavors of their
miniaturized cracker sandwiches: peanut butter, and cheese. Other varieties have
come and gone, including a diversion into a S'mores version with a combination of
quasi-Nutella and marshmallow creme between two shrunken-down crackers.
It's hard to deny the lasting appeal of Ritz Bits. You probably remember the animated commercials
featuring swarms of mischievous crackers going to town on either a jar of peanut butter,
or an entire planet of "Cheez" before combining in some kind of cracker fusion dance. The miniature
cracker sandwiches are still around, and are still sold in small bags or plastic cups,
holding what would be a heaping handful for your average eight-year-old.
Before the rise of Roblox, '90s parents occasionally needed to fight their kids'
urge to rush out the door to touch grass just long enough to get a healthy-enough snack down their
gullets so they wouldn't try to raid the fridge later. Thus, Go-Gurt was born. Kids of the Clinton
era definitely saw the appeal of yogurt that could be consumed rapidly and single-handedly.
General Mills, parent company of Yoplait, introduced the Otter Pop-style, slurpable tubes
of low-fat yogurt in 1998, and still maintains pride in the brand. From the skater kid mascot
that graced the first boxes of Go-Gurt, to the contemporary licensing deals with kid-favorite
properties like Spongebob and Star Wars, Go-Gurt's always been a precision-tooled product for kids.
Contemporary kids may not be running out the door to go skate, but convenience is timeless.
It was the summer of 2020. The world may have been plunging into social and economic devastation,
but all hope was not lost. After all, this was the time when Dunkaroos returned to US store
shelves. Never before had the urge to mentally regress to childhood innocence been so strong
for millennials, nor had the task been ever so easy. General Mills put out the call directly to
'90s kids in the company's official blog, and the frosting-scooping cookies reemerged. We welcomed
them back with open mouths, after the cookies spent the previous eight years exiled to Canada,
during which General Mills held a promotional campaign literally encouraging smuggling.
The cheeky criminal solicitation campaign reflected a change in advertising regulations in
Canada. With Dunkaroos being too sugar-filled for the Canadian authorities to allow child-centric
advertising, General Mills pivoted to seizing on the repressed nostalgia of
American adults by calling for relief packages of life-saving Dunkaroos to cross the border.
Since the 2020 relaunch, smuggling has become unnecessary, and the line has expanded into a
chocolate frosting version. Unfortunately, the cartoon kangaroo mascot has not been revived.
"Aw, man!"
Here's another wacky marketing idea: a candy with enough acidity in it to mess up the inside of
your mouth. Impact Confections built it, and '90s kids came in droves. To this day, Warheads of all
types, from hard candy to gummy, are just as much a fun treat as a rite of passage. Brave the few
seconds of caustic sourness and break through to the other side, and feel the relief of the
candy's pleasantly-sweet core. Since 1993, kids have tested each other's mettle with Warheads.
The questionable candy plays off children's desire to push the boundaries of safety,
but they came about before the age of MTV's "Jackass" and viral video challenges. For
better or worse, we now know just how many Warheads it takes to make your mouth bleed.
"So sour!"
"SOUR FAIL!"
The mixture of ascorbic, citric, lactic, and malic acids giving Warheads their unrivaled
sourness is within FDA limits, but in the years since their debut, Impact Confections has had to
introduce warnings to those with sensitive mouths against eating too many in a brief time frame.
In 1981, Hershey's advertised their Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with this famous ad campaign.
"Hey, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!"
"You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!"
In 1994, a co-branding initiative got Hershey's in our General Mills. Reese's Puffs cereal was
reportedly General Mills' first licensed product since an E.T.-branded cereal introduced a decade
prior. The association with the Reese's Pieces-loving alien in their advertising was
more than a little prophetic, with the E.T. cereal being chocolate and peanut butter-flavored also.
2015 saw General Mills phasing out of artificial flavors and colors from Reese's Puffs and other
cereals. Since then, new shapes and inscrutable metaverse promotions have followed in the cereal's
wake, but its place on store shelves has been stable. Kids who grew up with E.T. on the theater
screen, VHS, DVD, and streaming have all made up a steady consumer base for Reese's Puffs.
Not to be outdone by General Mills, Post licensed Nabisco's famed Oreos for cereal
purposes in 1998. The result was Oreo O's. But after nine years of presumably steady sales,
in the wake of Kraft Foods selling its entire Post subsidiary, the chocolate cookie-flavored
rings with a speckled cream coating disappeared everywhere except for South Korea. For ten long
years, between 2007 and 2017, licensing loopholes left Korea with the only manufacturer still
putting out the product, while Post acquired the taste-alike Malt-O-Meal's Cookies & Cream cereal.
"What do you want?"
"I want Malt-O-Meal. Edgar, Malt-O-Meal."
"Okay." When Oreo O's
relaunched stateside in 2017, the differences between its original form and its reboot were
easily detectable. Marshmallow bits were out, fans found the flavor wanting, and the shade-sporting
humanoid glob of cream with the '90s 'tude was gone as a mascot. Fan reaction was split,
with some suggesting that the new US Oreo O's were just Malt-O-Meals' cereal in different packaging.