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Bite-sized nuggets of Nestlé Crunch — crisped rice drenched in milk chocolate — launched in 1994 exclusively for movie-theater concession stands, because chocolate bars sell poorly at theaters and poppable, rattling boxes don't. It stayed a theater exclusive for nearly two decades, and it's still on concession counters today: one of the few 90s candy inventions that never went away.
TasteTations were Hershey's answer to Werther's Originals — creamy hard candies that arrived in the mid-1990s with a lineup of chocolate-inspired flavors: Chocolate, Chocolate Mint, Chocolate Raspberry, Chocolate Caramel, Caramel, Peppermint, and Butterscotch. Heavily promoted with TV spots and in-store samples, they were the candy that felt sophisticated and indulgent. Yet despite the hype, they couldn't survive the early 2000s and faded from shelves, leaving a devoted nostalgic following.
The hollow milk-chocolate sphere with a surprise sealed inside. 'What's in the Wonder Ball?' You cracked it open to find little candies — a treasure-hunt snack that had a much stranger backstory than most kids ever knew.
The $1 chocolate bars kids sold by the case for their school — the white-and-red wrappered almond and caramel bars you lugged around the neighborhood in a cardboard carrying box. Fundraising, one guilt-tripped relative at a time.
Mars's turn-of-the-'90s creation: a square of whole-grain cookie topped with creamy peanut butter, enrobed in milk chocolate studded with crunchy cookie bits. It became legendary not for its sales — which were solid — but for the family politics behind its disappearance.
The peanuts-caramel-nougat log of every checkout lane and Halloween haul — over a century old, with an identity mystery baked into the name. The company swore it honored a president's daughter; everyone else noticed a certain slugger's fame exploding at exactly that moment. No one has ever settled it.