Bomb Pop
The red-white-and-blue rocket that turned every kid's tongue tricolor. Born in Kansas City in 1955, the Bomb Pop was the default ice-cream-truck order of a thousand 90s summers — cherry, lime, and blue raspberry stacked in one patriotic missile.
The Bomb Pop was created on July 30, 1955, by James S. Merritt and D.S. Abernethy in Kansas City, Missouri, and for decades it was the pride of Merritt Foods — a finned, rocket-shaped ice pop stacking cherry, lime, and blue raspberry into red, white, and blue stages. It looked like something off a launchpad, which was precisely the appeal in Cold War America, and it never needed a redesign.
For 90s kids the Bomb Pop was pure ritual: the distant jingle of the ice cream truck, the sprint to the curb, and the race to finish all three stages before the July sun turned them into tricolor syrup running down your wrist. It was the unofficial dessert of every Fourth of July block party, the thing you ate while your popsicle-stick tongue cycled from red to purple to blue — and the pop whose blue raspberry stage settled, for an entire generation, what the color blue tastes like.
Merritt Foods closed in 1991, and Wells' Dairy — the Iowa company behind Blue Bunny — bought the Bomb Pop brand the same year and has kept the rockets in freezer cases ever since. For the pop's 50th birthday in 2005, the brand established National Bomb Pop Day, celebrated the last Thursday in June — a national holiday for a popsicle, which feels about right for the treat that made summer look like a flag.
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