Scooby-Doo Fruit Snacks
Betty Crocker's Scooby-shaped fruit snacks in the purple box — the character fruit snack of the 2000s lunchbox. The opaque sky-blue Scooby was the piece everyone wanted, and yes, the old ones really did taste different: the recipe changed in 2015, and fans have never forgiven it.
Around the turn of the millennium, as the Scooby-Doo franchise roared back to life — new series on the air, the 2002 live-action movie on the way — Betty Crocker (under parent General Mills) put Scooby on a fruit snack. Surviving boxes date the snacks to at least 2001, planting them at the exact cultural moment when Scooby was suddenly everywhere again under the Cartoon Network-era license.
Through the 2000s they were a lunchbox default, heirs to the fruit-snack empire General Mills had built with Fruit by the Foot (1991) and Gushers (1992). The gummies came shaped like Scooby and the rest of the Mystery Inc. crew, but everyone was after one piece: the opaque, sky-blue Scooby, the fan-favorite of the box and the subject of two decades of lunch-table lore.
Unlike most items on this site, the snack never left shelves — it's still sold today. But in 2015 General Mills announced it would strip artificial flavors and colors from its entire fruit-snack line (a survey had told them half of shoppers wanted it), and as the reformulated versions rolled out over the following two years, the classic opaque colors and flavors disappeared. Fans have petitioned Betty Crocker to bring back the originals ever since. The product survived its own era; the version everyone actually remembers didn't.
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