25 Vintage Candies You Forgot Existed (Do You Remember These?)

The TriviaTalent Team · 7 min read

There was a glass case near the register, and if you were patient the clerk would wait while you pointed. A nickel went a long way. You walked out with a little paper sack, and the choosing was half the fun.

A lot of what filled that case is gone now, or so rare you’d have to hunt for it. Here are 25 vintage candies that once seemed like they’d be around forever — see how many you can still taste just by reading the name.

1. Astro Pop

Two engineers who had worked on the space program quit their jobs and, in 1963, dreamed up a cone-shaped lollipop molded like a three-stage rocket — three see-through layers of cherry, passionfruit, and pineapple. Spangler retired it in 2004, but a candy fan later bought the name and brought it back.

2. Bonomo Turkish Taffy

Despite the name, it was never a true taffy and never Turkish; the family called it a short nougat. You were meant to give the chilled bar a good whack against the counter so it shattered into brittle shards. It came in vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and banana, vanished in 1989, and returned in 2010.

3. Necco Wafers

Thin pastel discs first cut on Oliver Chase’s lozenge machine back in 1847, which makes them one of the oldest candies in America. Union soldiers carried them in the Civil War, when they were called “hub wafers.” Necco’s 2018 bankruptcy nearly ended them before Spangler revived them in 2020.

4. Sky Bar

Necco launched this one in 1938 with a skywriting campaign — hence the name. A single chocolate bar held four little chambers, each with its own center; by its later years that meant caramel, vanilla, peanut, and fudge. It, too, went down with Necco in 2018 and was revived the next year.

5. Black Jack Gum

Thomas Adams added licorice to his chewing gum in 1884 and called it Adams’ Black Jack — the first flavored gum in the country and the first sold in sticks. Slow sales ended it in the 1970s, but nostalgic demand keeps bringing it back in limited runs.

6. Beeman’s Gum

An Ohio physician, Edward Beeman, put pepsin in chewing gum and first sold it in 1890, claiming it aided digestion. Early aviators chewed it for luck — Chuck Yeager is said to have had a stick before every flight. Production stopped in 1978, and it now returns only as a nostalgia gum.

7. Clark’s Teaberry Gum

Dating to 1900, this pink stick carried a wintergreen-like teaberry flavor all its own. It peaked in the 1960s on the strength of a jaunty commercial set to Herb Alpert’s “The Teaberry Shuffle,” a tune that had everyone doing a little dance at the counter.

8. Sen-Sen

Sold since the late 1800s as a “breath perfume,” these tiny licorice squares slid out of a little sleeved box when you shook it. Generations used them to cover the smell of a cigarette or a beer — The Music Man even mentions them. Sen-Sen finally disappeared in 2013.

9. Clark Bar

David L. Clark rolled out his crispy peanut-butter-and-chocolate bar in 1917 and shipped it to the doughboys in World War I. It’s remembered as the first successful “combination” candy bar. After Necco’s collapse, Boyer of Altoona, Pennsylvania revived it in 2019.

10. Zagnut

The same D. L. Clark company gave us Zagnut in 1930: a bar of peanut butter rolled in toasted coconut. Hershey quietly makes it today, but you’ll rarely spot one — though a 1945 Army photo caught soldiers buying them at a post exchange in the Pacific.

11. Mallo Cup

During the Depression, brothers Bill and Bob Boyer made candy in their own kitchen, and in 1936 they came up with a chocolate cup filled with whipped coconut-marshmallow. Tucked in the wrapper were cardboard “Mallo Cup Points” coins that kids cut out and mailed in for prizes.

12. Mary Jane

Charles N. Miller mixed peanut butter into molasses in 1914 and named the chewy penny candy after his favorite aunt. In its yellow wrapper with a single red stripe, it clung to your teeth for a good while. It passed through many hands before Atkinson brought it back in 2020.

13. Bit-O-Honey

First wrapped in 1924 by a Chicago company, this honey taffy studded with almond bits was once a bar divided into six segments. It pulled at your fillings much like a Mary Jane. Over the years it moved from Nestlé to Pearson’s and now to Spangler.

14. Charleston Chew

Named for the dance craze, this chocolate-covered vanilla nougat bar was born in 1922 from the Fox-Cross company, started by a stage actor named Donley Cross. It’s still around under Tootsie Roll today, if you know where to look.

15. Abba-Zaba

A chewy taffy bar hiding a peanut-butter center, wrapped since the 1950s in an unmistakable yellow-and-black checkerboard. It dates to 1922 and is still made by Annabelle in California — though for years you mostly found it west of the Rockies.

16. Walnettos

Minneapolis’s J. N. Collins Company introduced these chewy walnut caramels in 1919. They seemed to fade by the 1960s, then got a surprise second life after a Laugh-In character kept leering, “Wanna Walnetto?” on television.

17. Good & Plenty

First made in Philadelphia in 1893, these pink-and-white candy shells over black licorice are often called America’s oldest branded candy. A whole generation can still sing the Choo-Choo Charlie jingle about a boy shaking a box like a train engine.

18. Chuckles

Since 1921, a little paper tray of five sugar-dusted jelly candies — cherry, lemon, orange, lime, and that lone black licorice piece nobody quite fought over. One of each flavor, every single time.

19. Pixy Stix

The sweet-and-sour powder began in 1942 as a drink mix called Fruzola Jr., until the maker noticed children eating it straight from the packet. In 1959 he poured it into colored paper straws and the Pixy Stix was born — cousin to Lik-M-Aid and Fun Dip.

20. Nik-L-Nip

Little wax bottles filled with sweet colored syrup. You bit off the top, drank the drop inside, and then — admit it — chewed the flavorless wax for a while after. The name winks at the nickel they once cost.

21. Candy Cigarettes

Chalky sugar sticks or gum “cigarettes,” some with a red tip and a puff of powdered sugar for “smoke.” They’ve been around since the 1880s. As attitudes shifted, makers dropped the red tips and started calling them “candy sticks.”

22. Fizzies

Drop a tablet into a glass of water and watch it foam up into a fizzy fruit drink. Introduced in 1957, Fizzies outsold Kool-Aid at their peak. A ban on their artificial sweeteners knocked them out in the early 1970s, and later revivals never quite caught on again.

23. Space Food Sticks

Pillsbury rode the Apollo excitement in the late 1960s with chewy snack rods pitched as a “nutritionally balanced” energy food, tied right to NASA. Skylab astronauts even tested a version in orbit in 1972.

24. Razzles

“First it’s a candy, then it’s a gum.” From 1966, you popped in the little discs as candy and, a few chews later, they turned into bubble gum. The name came from a raspberry flavor, Razzleberry, that never actually made it to shelves.

25. Pop Rocks

The candy that crackled and snapped on your tongue, thanks to trapped carbon dioxide. General Foods put it out in the mid-1970s, and a famous playground rumor — that it killed little Mikey from the cereal ads — was pure myth. It left shelves in 1980 before later coming back.

Frequently asked questions

Why did so many of these candies disappear?

The reasons vary. Some, like Fizzies, lost the sweeteners they depended on. Others couldn’t keep up with changing tastes or bigger national brands. And a whole cluster of them went dark at once in 2018, when the New England Confectionery Company went bankrupt, before other makers bought the recipes and brought them back.

Can you still buy any of these today?

More than you’d think. Necco Wafers, Sky Bars, Clark Bars, Charleston Chews, Abba-Zabas, Good & Plenty, and others are all still made, often by new owners. A few, like Walnettos and Bonomo Turkish Taffy, were revived by fans who refused to let them go.

What else from those years do people miss?

Plenty — and not just candy. If this took you back, you may enjoy our look at things from the ’70s you don’t see anymore, or the freedoms in things kids did in the 1960s that would be illegal today.

Where can I check these facts?

Every date and detail here is drawn from the reputable sources listed just below.

Sources

Got a sweet tooth for the past? Play our trivia quizzes and take another trip down memory lane.