Handi-Snacks
Kraft's cheese-and-crackers tray: a sealed compartment of processed cheese, a stack of crackers, and one flat red plastic stick for spreading. The stick was not a utensil. It was the entire point.
The "Handi-Snacks" name had an earlier incarnation — Kraft used it starting in 1951 for a line of spreadable party cheeses, a completely different product. The version everyone remembers arrived in 1980 — Kraft's trademark filing puts its first use at February 20 of that year — with a slogan that asked: "Can something this wholesome be so much fun?" A lunchbox staple through the 1980s, it exploded in the 1990s. By 1996 Handi-Snacks had grown into a $79 million seller; Kraft committed $10 million to a single ad campaign in 1997, sponsored Nickelodeon's "Slime Time Sweepstakes" in the early 1990s, and distributed Magic School Bus CD-ROMs with the product in 1999. That same era saw a Ritz cracker variety. Through all of it, the red stick was the star — designed for small hands and destined to be licked absolutely clean.
In recent years, Kraft discontinued the red stick, citing environmental concerns. The packs survive, stickless.
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