Sour Patch Kids
Sour then sweet: a gritty coat of citric and tartaric acid that made your whole face pucker, then a soft gummy kid underneath as the apology. The 90s schoolyard sour-candy arms race arguably starts here.
The candy began life in the early 1970s as 'Mars Men' — little martian-shaped gummies created by confectioner Frank Galatolie of Jaret International, riding the decade's space craze. They went into production in Canada in the late 1970s, years before most American kids would ever taste one.
The rebrand that mattered came in the mid-1980s, when the martians became kids and the candy hit US shelves in 1985 as Sour Patch Kids — a rename widely believed to be a wink at the Cabbage Patch Kids doll mania then at its peak. The formula was the hook: an invert-sugar gummy dusted in sour sugar blending citric and tartaric acid, a one-two punch the brand eventually distilled into the slogans 'Sour Then Sweet' and 'Sour. Sweet. Gone.' For 90s kids it was the gateway into competitive sourness, traded and endured at lunch tables alongside Warheads and sour straws.
The brand belongs today to snack giant Mondelez International, which has stretched the pucker into an empire: Sour Patch Kids gum in 2014, ice cream and freezer pops in 2018, a Post breakfast cereal the same year with sour sugar that dissolves into the milk, and — in 2024 — Sour Patch Kids Oreos. The kids remain the rare candy mascots whose entire personality is mild cruelty followed by contrition, which is also a fair description of eating one.
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Warheads
The sour candy that burned your face off for five glorious seconds. Warheads turned the playground dare into a $40 million industry — keeping a straight face through the first ten seconds made you playground royalty.
Sour Skittles
Regular Skittles under a grainy sour-sugar coating that genuinely shredded your tongue if you finished the bag — and everyone finished the bag. The green-and-yellow pouch turned the candy aisle's safest brand into a dare.
Airheads
The stretchy, tangy taffy bar in the loud mylar wrapper — Blue Raspberry stained your tongue, and White Mystery was a gamble by design. Fifty cents of pure lunchbox status.
Amazin' Fruit Gummy Bears
Hershey's entry into the gummy-bear wars, forever burned into memory by TV commercials of little bears who sang like a choir. For a lot of 90s kids, it was the first gummy bear they ever met.