10 Food Products We Are Still Begging Companies to Bring Back

From Altoids Sours to PB Crisps and Orbitz, these discontinued snacks still live rent-free in our heads. Here is why they disappeared and why they have not come back.

November 2, 2025

Some discontinued products fade without a fight. Nobody starts a petition for a discontinued brand of paper towels. Nobody posts about it fifteen years later wondering why it was taken away.

These are not those products.

The ten snacks and drinks on this list occupy a specific category of discontinued food: the ones that people are still angry about. The ones where empty packaging sells on eBay for real money. The ones where someone posts a photo online and a thousand people reply within an hour sharing their grief. They were not just good. They were formative, and losing them felt personal in a way that losing a mediocre product never does.

Here is what happened to each of them, and the honest answer to whether any of them are coming back.

1. Altoids Sours (2001 to 2010)

Altoids Sours arrived in those same iconic small metal tins as the original mints, which immediately signaled that they were serious. The flavors, Tangerine, Citrus, Apple, Raspberry, and Mango, were not gently sour in the way that most sour candy hedges toward sweet. They were aggressively, face-scrunching, eye-watering sour in a way that felt almost confrontational.

That intensity was the point. Altoids Sours built a following among people who wanted the real sour experience and found most sour candy underwhelming. The tin format meant they were portable, shareable, and became a kind of social object. Offering someone an Altoids Sour was a small test.

Wrigley discontinued them in 2010 citing low demand, which fans have disputed ever since. Empty tins in good condition sell on eBay for between twenty and fifty dollars. Active petitions have circulated for over a decade. Reddit threads about Altoids Sours appear with enough regularity that the community has developed its own vocabulary for the grief.

Mars acquired Wrigley in 2008 and has remained completely silent about any possibility of revival. Fifteen years of silence is probably an answer, but the fan base has not accepted it as one.

2. PB Crisps (1992 to 1995)

PB Crisps were only on shelves for three years but they left an impression that has lasted three decades. Planters made them in the shape of peanuts, which was a piece of self-aware product design that matched the Mr. Peanut brand perfectly. The shell was light and crispy and the peanut butter filling inside was creamy and substantial. The sweet-salty balance was genuinely difficult to achieve and Planters achieved it.

They were discontinued in 1995 with no public explanation. No announcement, no farewell, no limited run. They were simply gone.

The absence created the cult. PB Crisps consistently appear at the top of “most missed snack” polls. Facebook groups dedicated to their return have accumulated thousands of members. The appeal is partly the product and partly the mystery of why something so well-regarded disappeared so completely.

Planters has said publicly on multiple occasions that they have no plans to bring PB Crisps back. The manufacturing process was specialized enough that restarting production would require significant investment, and the brand has not been convinced the demand justifies it. The fans disagree and continue to make that disagreement known.

3. Hi-C Ecto Cooler (1987 to 2001)

Ecto Cooler launched in 1987 as a Ghostbusters promotional tie-in, designed around Slimer and intended to have a shelf life as long as the movie’s cultural relevance. What nobody predicted was that the tangerine citrus drink in the bright green juice box would outlast the Ghostbusters franchise by nearly a decade and become a defining taste memory for an entire generation of kids.

Hi-C rebranded it as Shoutin’ Orange Tangergreen in 1997 when the Ghostbusters license expired, which removed the Slimer branding but kept the formula. Sales were never the same without the character. It was discontinued entirely in 2001.

When the Ghostbusters reboot arrived in 2016, Coca-Cola brought Ecto Cooler back as a limited tie-in. It sold out almost immediately. People were paying significant markups on secondary markets for a juice box. Then the promotion ended and it disappeared again.

The lesson from the 2016 return is that the demand is completely real. The obstacle is the licensing relationship with the Ghostbusters franchise. Any future revival is tied to whatever Sony does with the film series.

4. Butterfinger BBs (1992 to 2006)

Butterfinger BBs were bite-sized spheres of the same crispy peanut butter interior covered in chocolate that made the original bar famous. The format changed the experience meaningfully. The chocolate to crispy interior ratio shifted in favor of more chocolate per bite, which many people preferred to the bar. They were easier to eat at a movie, easier to share, and produced fewer of the notorious Butterfinger crumbs that made the bar messy.

They were associated closely with Bart Simpson, who was at peak cultural saturation during their launch years. The BBs felt like the right product for that era.

Ferrara discontinued BBs in 2006 and replaced them with Mini Bites in 2009, which are a different product in a different format. The fan response has been consistent for almost two decades: Mini Bites are not the same. Ferrara has maintained that they are equivalent. This disagreement shows no signs of resolution.

5. Orbitz (1997 to 1998)

Orbitz was a clear fruit drink with small gelatin spheres suspended throughout the liquid. The spheres did not sink and did not dissolve. They floated in place, held by a precise formulation involving gellan gum that kept the liquid viscous enough to suspend them while still appearing transparent. The bottles looked exactly like lava lamps.

It was the most visually audacious mainstream beverage ever sold in American grocery stores and it generated enormous curiosity when it launched. People bought it to look at it before they bought it to drink it.

The problem was that the gelatin spheres felt wrong in the mouth. The visual novelty did not survive first contact with the actual experience of drinking the product. Orbitz sold on curiosity and could not convert curious first-time buyers into repeat customers because the core drinking experience put most people off.

It lasted approximately one year before Clearly Canadian discontinued it in 1998. Sealed original bottles are genuine collector’s items that sell for significant amounts on eBay. Orbitz is now more famous as a discontinued product than it ever was as an actual drink, which is a strange kind of immortality.

6. Squeezit (1985 to 2001)

Squeezit was a fruit drink in a small plastic bottle designed to be squeezed rather than poured. The bottle was the product as much as the liquid inside. Different flavors had different colored bottles with character faces printed on them and trading flavors at lunch became a genuine social ritual in elementary schools throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.

General Mills discontinued Squeezit in 2001. A revival attempt in 2006 with a recyclable bottle format failed to recapture the original appeal. The original bottle design was integral to the experience and the new version could not replicate it.

This is one of the cases where a product’s packaging was so central to its identity that the product effectively cannot be brought back without replicating something that no longer makes economic or environmental sense. The magic was the squeeze. Without the original bottle format, it is just fruit drink.

7. Kudos Granola Bars (1986 to 2017)

Kudos occupied a specific and appealing position in the snack landscape. They were marketed as granola bars, which gave parents permission to buy them, but they were constructed like candy bars, which made kids actually want to eat them. M&M varieties, chocolate chip varieties, peanut butter varieties. The granola was present but it was not the point.

Mars discontinued Kudos in 2017 after thirty-one years. The timing was notable because the health food bar category was experiencing significant growth, which might seem like it would help a product positioned as a healthier option. The problem was that Kudos was not actually a health food bar and the growing sophistication of consumers in that category made the original positioning harder to maintain.

The millennial generation that grew up on Kudos now has disposable income and nostalgia for exactly this kind of product. Mars has not moved on bringing them back despite what appears to be genuine market demand.

8. Wonder Ball (1997 to 2004)

The original Wonder Ball was a hollow chocolate sphere with a small toy inside. The jingle, “Oh I wonder, wonder, what’s inside a Wonder Ball,” was one of the more effective pieces of candy marketing of the 1990s because it turned the product into an experience built around anticipation.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission raised concerns about the toy-inside-food format and Nestle pulled the original version in 2004. A reformulated version replaced the toy with candy inside, which addressed the safety concern but removed the thing that made Wonder Ball special. The candy-inside version was discontinued and then briefly revived and then discontinued again.

Wonder Ball has returned in various forms often enough that it has developed trust issues with its own fan base. People who got excited about a revival and then watched it disappear again are understandably reluctant to invest emotionally in the next announcement.

9. Hubba Bubba Bubble Jug (1980s to 2012)

Hubba Bubba Bubble Jug was a container of flavored powder that transformed into bubble gum when you chewed it. The powder went into your mouth as powder and the chewing action activated the gum. It was genuinely strange and genuinely fun and the playground spectacle of pouring powder into your mouth and producing gum was exactly the kind of thing that spread through word of mouth among kids.

It was discontinued around 2012 with no announcement and no farewell. The internet response has been a consistent pattern of people asking whether it was real, others confirming it was real, and everyone agreeing the loss was unjust.

The format is probably too unusual for modern product lines and the powder-to-gum mechanism would face more scrutiny today than it did in the 1980s. This is one of the cases where the era that produced it was a necessary condition for its existence.

10. Squeezit Mystery Color (Special Mention)

Rather than end with Chiclets, which still exists in other countries and lacks the emotional resonance of the other entries, this slot goes to a specific variant of Squeezit that deserves its own recognition.

Mystery Color Squeezit came in a bottle that appeared to contain a colorless liquid. When you squeezed it into a glass or drank it directly, it turned a random color. The liquid itself was clear in the bottle and the color developed on contact with air or saliva through a pH-sensitive dye reaction.

It was a product that turned drinking fruit punch into a science experiment and it was beloved by exactly the age group it was designed for. It disappeared along with the rest of the Squeezit line in 2001 and has never been specifically discussed as a revival candidate even in conversations about bringing back the original Squeezit.

Why These Have Not Come Back

The honest answer varies by product but a few patterns explain most of them.

Manufacturing processes for specialized products are not preserved when a line is discontinued. The equipment gets repurposed or sold. The suppliers move on. Restarting production is not a matter of flipping a switch. It requires rebuilding supply chains, requalifying ingredients, and often retooling production lines. For a product with uncertain demand, that investment is hard to justify.

Ownership changes are the other major factor. Most of these products have passed through multiple corporate hands since they were discontinued. The institutional knowledge of why they worked and who loved them does not transfer cleanly through acquisitions. New management teams inherit a catalog of discontinued SKUs and see line items rather than cultural artifacts.

Legal and regulatory changes have made some formats harder to revive. The toy-in-food category that Wonder Ball occupied faces more scrutiny now. Packaging that was standard in the 1980s sometimes cannot meet current requirements without fundamental redesign.

And some products are simply victims of the economics of shelf space. Retailers give brands a fixed number of facings. Every slot a revived legacy product takes is a slot that cannot go to a current bestseller. The math rarely favors nostalgia over proven volume.

The Ones That Made It Back

Not every discontinued product stays gone. These returned successfully enough to note:

Dunkaroos came back in 2020 and found a genuine audience, though debates about the recipe continue. French Toast Crunch returned in 2014 after a sustained campaign by fans who remembered it from the 1990s. Planters Cheez Balls returned in 2018 as a limited edition and sold out quickly. Surge came back in 2014 initially as an Amazon exclusive after a fan campaign that included purchasing billboard space near Coca-Cola’s headquarters. 3D Doritos returned in 2021 as 3D Crunch, though fans consistently say the texture is different from the original.

The lesson from these revivals is that sustained and visible fan demand does move companies sometimes, particularly when the product has strong name recognition and the manufacturing process is not too complex to restart.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do companies discontinue popular products? The most common reasons are declining sales volume that no longer justifies shelf space and production costs, ownership changes that result in portfolio rationalization, manufacturing or ingredient changes that make the original formula difficult to reproduce, and regulatory changes that affect the product format. Popularity in memory does not always translate to sales volume at the time of discontinuation.

Do petitions actually work? Sometimes. Surge, Dunkaroos, and French Toast Crunch all returned after sustained consumer campaigns. The petition itself is less important than the visibility it creates. A petition with hundreds of thousands of signatures tells a brand’s marketing team that there is a story to be told and potential sales to be captured. It does not guarantee a return but it does get the conversation started internally.

Where can I find discontinued snacks? Specialty retailers like CandyFavorites.com and OldTimeCandy.com carry hard-to-find and vintage products and occasionally have old stock of discontinued items. eBay has sealed vintage packaging for most of the products on this list. Some discontinued American products are still available in other countries and can be ordered through international specialty retailers.

Which discontinued snack has the most active fan community? Altoids Sours and PB Crisps consistently generate the most active ongoing online discussion. Both have dedicated Reddit communities, active petition campaigns, and regular social media presence from fans who have been asking for their return for over a decade.

Related reading: Discontinued Candy from the 70s and 80s and 10 Discontinued Drinks from the 90s We Still Miss