Jell-O Pudding Pops

General Foods spent the late 1970s testing its frozen pudding experiment in trial markets — Cincinnati, Denver, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City — before taking Jell-O Pudding Pops national in 1981. They came in chocolate, vanilla, and chocolate-vanilla swirl, in boxes of twelve at $1.99, and the pitch was the lighter choice: about 100 calories a pop versus 170 for ice cream bars. What kids remembered was the texture — genuinely pudding-like, dense and creamy where a popsicle was icy, under a thin film of frost right out of the freezer.

The market listened: first-year sales hit roughly $100 million, and the pops became a freezer-aisle fixture whose glow lasted well into 1990s childhoods. But for General Foods and later Kraft, the pops were never as profitable as they were popular, and distribution dwindled through the '90s. In 2004 the brand was handed to Popsicle, which changed the recipe and the shape — and fans of the original never took to the remake. By the early 2010s Pudding Pops were gone again, leaving behind one of nostalgia's most-requested comebacks.