In a modern world of convenience, it’s important for people to take a step back, smell the roses, and eat a little snack to keep up their energy. Thankfully, we have tons of amazing and great tasting snack foods to whet our appetite!
Well…we USED to. Nowadays, the snacks we have kinda suck. I mean, they’re all good to eat, and your head honchos (Oreo, Lays, etc.) aren’t going anywhere. But still…what HAPPENED? Time to take a look down memory lane and remember the good ol’ days when snacks had a soul…and weren’t boring as hell.
Let’s start with a pretty strong contender: Trix Yogurt. This was the stuff of legend when I was a kid (and hopefully when you were). Trix is a cereal brand famous for fruity flavors while still maintaining the sweetness of a sugary cereal. Bonus, unlike Captain Crunch, it didn’t absolutely shred the top of your mouth!
Combining the fruity Trix with the creamy smoothness of Yoplait yogurt was just a slam dunk of an idea. I mean, honestly, this stuff was like crack. Anytime my parents bought some to bring back to the house, it’d be gone within a few days.
So…where did it go? I remember the day as though it was only yesterday: my family going to the local Walmart to pick up some groceries. I marched right down to the yogurt aisle to get my favorite Trix-Yoplait sugar monstrosity (yeah, these things were turbo unhealthy) and slap it into the cart…but it wasn’t there.
Apparently, the stuffed suits at Yoplait discontinued it to “declining sales” and the market going in a “new direction”. Yeah, right. They just hate kids.
Don’t worry though, this story DOES have a happy ending! Yoplait saw the dread, terror, and inherent rage (really, mild annoyance) from the kids-then-adults-now of the early 2000s, and decided in 2021 to bring the Trix yogurt back, if only for a limited time. They only released a couple flavors recently, but they plan on slowly introducing it back into the wild!
So…success! I mean, it’s not really back all the way yet, but at least it’s getting there. So huzzah to Trix!
Alright, let’s talk about another great snack (technically drink) that didn’t survive the test of time: SURGE.
SURGE was a soda brand released by Coca-Cola in early 1997 as a way to compete with Pepsi-Co’s almost insurmountable hold on the citrus drink market with Mountain Dew. It was bright green and advertised as loaded with citrus flavor!
SURGE was advertised immediately following its release, during Super Bowl XXXI (spoilers: the Packers won)! The can was also in your face and energetic, promoting an active lifestyle while drinking it. You may by thinking that it looks an awful lot like an energy drink, and yeah, you’d be right. SURGE was released in an era before energy drinks like Monster and Red Bull were released, so it essentially got big ahead of its time.
SURGE was also pretty popular, going into ’98 and ’99. Teens loved the drink, and schools actively held it in vending machines all the time. It was proposed as a contender against Mountain Dew, and contend against Mountain Dew it did. Pepsi-Co started to shift their advertising to challenge the growth of SURGE.
Unfortunately, they wouldn’t HAVE to. Coca-Cola stocks would plummet around the early 2000s, and one of the first victims was, unfortunately, SURGE, which was discontinued in 2003 to low sales. But it held on with an iron grip for as long as it possibly could.
This isn’t the end of SURGE’s story, though! A community called the SURGE Movement is dedicated to bringing the citrus taste of SURGE back on the market! It’s slow going, but progress is progress, and if you want to see SURGE return in all of its glory, join the movement and make a difference today!
So…what’s the moral of this story? Aside from big companies lacking taste buds and also kinda being greedy a**holes, I mean. Well, I’d argue that it’s important for us to never take anything for granted, because it can be so easily taken away. It also teaches us that, if we’re willing to fight for it, we can restore anything to its former beauty…even snacks!