Combos
The pretzel tube injected with cheese — vending-machine royalty and the official fuel of every 90s road trip. A cylinder of salt and neon-orange filling that somehow never existed at home, only at gas stations, rest stops, and the machine outside the pool.
By Mars' own telling, Combos started in the early 1970s in Battle Creek, Michigan, with gloriously low tech: someone used a drill press to bore a hole in a pretzel and filled it with nacho cheese. The snack officially joined the Mars family in 1978, when commercial production moved to Albany, Georgia — company lore from that era even gave the parts names, with filled shells called Shotzels and empty ones Nutzels. By the company's own timeline, the recognizable modern lineup took shape as Combos Pretzels launched in 1980, with cracker shells following in 1985.
What made Combos a 90s memory wasn't the grocery aisle — it was placement. Combos lived in vending machines, gas-station racks, and convenience-store shelves, which made them travel food: the thing your dad grabbed at the Shell station two hours into the drive, the salty cylinder passed around the back seat. The format was the hook — a crunchy tube with the flavor sealed inside, no bag of loose dust, engineered for cup holders.
Mars leaned into that identity hard enough that Combos later became "the official cheese-filled snack of NASCAR," sponsoring Kyle Busch's No. 18 Toyota Camry — which won the 2008 Best Buy 400 with Combos as the primary sponsor. The line still runs today under Mars Wrigley in pretzel, cracker, and tortilla shells across seven standard flavors, cheddar cheese pretzel still first among equals, still waiting at eye level in the vending machine.
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