Little Hug Fruit Barrels

Little Hug Fruit Barrels arrived in 1974 from the American Beverage Corporation: an 8-ounce barrel-shaped plastic bottle sealed with a foil lid, filled with fruit drink in colors that needed no further introduction — red, blue, purple, orange. A 16-ounce sibling was sold as the Big Hug, but the little barrel is the icon. There was a technique to it. You peeled the foil back carefully or you punched a thumb through it, and either way some of it ended up on your shirt.

What made Little Hugs a fixture wasn't advertising — it was price and placement. They sold for coins, which earned them the enduring street name "quarter waters" in neighborhoods where the corner store stocked them at kid-eye level. They showed up by the case at cookouts, day camps, little-league games, and church basements, floating in coolers of half-melted ice. Blue raspberry versus fruit punch was a genuine schoolyard allegiance.

The brand has quietly outlived nearly everything else in the 90s cooler. American Beverage Corporation refreshed the line over the years, and in March 2015 its parent Royal Wessanen sold the company to Harvest Hill Beverage — the owner of Juicy Juice — for $55 million. The barrels themselves are still on shelves, still dirt cheap, still sealed in foil, and still mostly identified by color rather than by anything as formal as a flavor name.