Random Facts About ‘90s Lunch Box Items That Make Us Kinda Miss School (10 items)

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  (#1) String cheese

  • Cheese

  Baker Cheese is a Wisconsin-based, family-owned company that has been making cheese for more than 100 years. In the 1960s, with pizza rising in popularity, the company transitioned from specializing in cheddar cheese to mozzarella. This, in turn, led customers to ask Baker for smaller units of snackable mozzarella cheese. 

  Frank Baker may have been the first person to create string cheese in the Midwest, cutting mozzarella into ropes and then soaking the ropes in salt brine to make them "string." According to The Atlantic, he then took it to the local bar:

  “The marketing plan was very elaborate,” [Frank's grandson] Brian laughs. “It was going to parties and taverns and asking people, ‘What do you think?’”

  What they thought was this: It was easy to snack on. It had a mild, pleasant flavor profile. It wasn’t offensive. It was stringy. And it was popular among the bar goers.

  “[String cheese] certainly wasn’t targeted specifically to kids,” Brian said. “It was meant to be a functional, high quality piece of cheese you could peel and stretch.”
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  (#2) Babybel

  • Cheese

  These bite-sized cheeses were all the rage in the 1990s, but the Babybel brand - as part of France's Bel Group - dates to the mid-19th century. If you've ever wondered why Mini Babybels are called "mini" despite only coming in one size, you're not alone. As the brand explains on Twitter:

  MiniBabybels were originally manufactured larger as a regular cheese wheel. So that's why our MiniBabybel cheeses are considered a smaller version of the original Babybel from our origin country of France! 

  The mini cheese wheels were first released in 1977 and, in the United States, have supplanted the full-sized wheels. It is still possible to order these larger wheels in France, where they're sold as "Babybel Maxi."
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  (#3) Capri Sun

  • Canonical Version

  The first Capri Sun pouches were manufactured in 1969 in Eppelheim, Germany, under the brand name Capri-Sonne. However, it wouldn't reach international acclaim until a decade later, when heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali became the company's spokesman.

  According to the juice brand's website:

  [U]ntil this time, Ali had turned down all other endorsement offers. Muhammad Ali's international popularity brought Capri-Sonne attention across the planet. Most notably, Capri-Sonne's success in the Middle East and Asia can be attributed to this ad campaign.
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  (#4) Handi-Snacks Ditched Its Red Stick To Be More Eco-Friendly

  No, it's not the Mandela Effect in action - packs of both Handi-Snacks and pizza Lunchables used to come with a convenient rectangle for spreading their cheese and pizza sauce, respectively. However, the red sticks are no more. 

  Why Lunchables ditched their sticks hasn't received an official answer, but it may be for the same reason that Handi-Snacks did. In a 2019 tweet, Ritz explained, "The red sticks were removed in order to be more eco-friendly. People tend to throw the sticks away instead of recycling them."

  This environmental consideration has not stopped snackers from petitioning both Lunchables and Handi-Snacks to reinstate their sticks.
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  (#5) After Dunkaroos Were Discontinued In America, The Brand Asked Canadians To 'Smugglaroo' Them Over The Border

  First launched in Canada in the early 1990s, Dunkaroos are a fiendishly simple lunchtime snack: a handful of honey graham cookies and a thimble's worth of cake frosting. However, despite its huge popularity in the '90s, the treat was discontinued in the United States in 2012. 

  Four years later, Dunkaroos' parent company, General Mills, launched its "Smugglaroos" campaign. In short, it encouraged traveling Canadians to buy some Dunkaroos and share them with their deprived American friends. 

  According to General Mills' marketing director Jason Doolan, the campaign was started, in part, to crack down on the Dunkaroos black market. "Online, we started to see that there was cross-border shopping: people were posting that Americans could purchase Dunkaroos online for grossly inflated prices," he told The Globe and Mail.
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  (#6) Fruit Roll Up

  • Food

  thanks fruit snacks for the best gift ever: a life-size jersey made of fruit roll up. I would eat it if it wasnt framed pic.twitter.com/UIJH6cTs

  — Jeremy Lin (@JLin7) May 3, 2012

  In 2012, Betty Crocker Snacks presented the New York Knicks' Jeremy Lin with a basketball jersey made out of Fruit Roll-Ups. 

  Angela Ma, a marketing communications planner at General Mills, said her company made the jersey for Lin after he tweeted about his love of fruit snacks.
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  (#7) Fruit By The Foot Is Mostly Just Sugar

  Debuting in the early '90s and still going strong today, Fruit by the Foot became the focus of a viral speed-eating challenge while the world was on lockdown in 2020.

  The fruit-flavored snack has been a perennial favorite, not only because it's fun to eat, but also because of its extreme sweetness. While Fruit by the Foot does provide a somewhat decent serving of Vitamin C, Time magazine reports that the 3-foot treat consists of 48% sugar by weight. 
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  (#8) Hi-C Ecto Cooler Disappeared - But Returned Under A Different Name

  Launched as a tie-in product with The Real Ghostbusters animated series, Hi-C's Ecto Cooler offered a delicious orange and tangerine flavor, and a color reminiscent of the ghostly Slimer. The popular flavor outlasted the Ghostbusters cartoon and may have even predated it.

  The nostalgia blog Dinosaur Dracula has tracked down some early advertisements for Hi-C's Citrus Cooler (which first launched in 1969). However, while this seems to have the same acid-green coloring, it's unknown whether it featured the same Ecto flavor. Mental Floss reports that, after Ecto Cooler was discontinued, it was re-released under the Shoutin' Orange Tangergreen label. In 2006, this flavor was again rebranded as Crazy Citrus Cooler.
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  (#9) WarHeads

  The Warheads sour candy was so popular in 1999 that its inventor, Peter De Yager, called it a "$40 million brand." But what gives it such a sour punch? 

  It's a combination of citric acid - like the kind you find in lemons and limes - and malic acid. Wired describes malic acid as:

  ...one of the sourest edible substances known to humankind.... which gives apples their tartness and wine its tangy quality...

  As to how Warheads can stay sour for so long, that's probably a feature of the candy's hydrogenated palm oil coating. Wired speculates that the oil "acts as an invisible time-­release mechanism. As the oil melts, it releases hits of malic acid."
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  (#10) Fruit Gushers Produced A Commercial About A Boy Squirting Gusher Juice Out Of His Eye

  Sometimes, a fact about '90s snacks is just a reminder that something exists. The Fruit Gushers brand was no stranger to weird commercials (case in point, the one where kids transformed into Cronenbergian fruit monsters), but "Gusher for an Eye" really takes the cake.

  Sadly, there isn't a lot of information floating around about what possessed Betty Crocker to pay for a 90-second web video about a boy who squirts Gusher juice at friends and baby birds, slimes his mother and co-workers, and whose own father drinks his blue tears - but they did. 

  The commercial was created by the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency and made the shortlist for the 2011 Clios - which is sort of like the Academy Awards of advertising.

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