Planters Cheez Balls
Planters' bright-blue canister of neon-orange puffed cheese balls — the road-trip and after-school snack that dyed your fingertips a shameless shade of orange. Discontinued in 2006, mourned for over a decade, and briefly resurrected by popular demand.
Planters Cheez Balls came in an unmistakable bright-blue canister topped with Mr. Peanut, filled with airy, neon-orange cheese puffs that left telltale dust on every finger. A fixture of 1990s pantries and lunchboxes — the exact original launch year isn't well documented — they were made by Planters, by then part of Nabisco and later Kraft.
Kraft discontinued Cheez Balls and their sibling Cheez Curls around 2006, and that seemed to be that. But the snack refused to be forgotten: fans organized Facebook petition groups and lobbied the company for years, treating the blue can as a lost artifact of childhood.
The campaign worked. On July 1, 2018, Planters brought Cheez Balls back in a retro-styled canister, sold for a limited run at Walmart and Amazon alongside Cheez Curls. The revival was a nostalgia victory lap — and a reminder of exactly how much orange dust a generation had missed.
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