9 min read
The 1990s candy aisle ran on gimmicks — toys hidden in chocolate, gum sold in bandage tins, candy holes sold in plastic tubes — and the gimmicks are mostly what killed it. Here are 11 discontinued 90s candies: seven that never came back, and four that made it back onto shelves, usually under a company that isn’t the one you remember.
LIST OF DISCONTINUED 90s CANDY
| Candy | Launched | Retired |
|---|---|---|
| PB Max | 1986 (per USPTO) | 1994 |
| Butterfinger BB’s | 1992 | 2006 |
| Life Savers Holes | 1990 | 1991 recall; gone mid-90s |
| Bonkers | 1985 | late 1990s |
| Crispy M&M’s | 1999 | 2005, again 2022 |
| Dweebs | early 1990s | ~1995 |
| Hershey’s TasteTations | 1996 | 2002 |
| Bar None | 1987 | 1997; revived 2019 |
| Wonder Ball (Nestlé Magic) | 1997 | 1997; revived 2000 & 2016 |
| Hubba Bubba (original) | 1979 | early 1990s; revived 2004 |
| Ouch! bubble gum | 1990s | mid-2000s; revived 2025 |
PB MAX
Retired: 1994
PB Max stacked real peanut butter on a whole-grain cookie and covered the whole thing in milk chocolate. Mars killed it around 1994 with roughly $50 million in sales on the books, because the Mars family disliked peanut butter. One detail every eulogy misses: Mars swore to the USPTO that it first sold the bar on March 27, 1986 — three years before the 1989 launch date the internet repeats. Mars let the trademark lapse in 2008. A revival house claimed the name in 2020, then abandoned the application in 2024 without selling a single bar.
BUTTERFINGER BB’S
Retired: 2006
Butterfinger BB’s packed the Butterfinger crunch into candy-shelled spheres you could pour from the bag. Bart Simpson sold them on television for years. Nestlé discontinued them in 2006 and never explained why — the leading fan theories involve melty shipping problems, none of them confirmed. The Simpsons returned to Butterfinger wrappers for the brand’s 100th anniversary in 2024. The BB’s didn’t.
LIFE SAVERS HOLES
Retired: 1991 (recalled), gone by the mid-90s
Life Savers Holes sold the punched-out middles of the mint — a genuinely funny idea that lasted about a year. In January 1991, RJR Nabisco recalled the plastic flip-top tubes after children bit off the dime-sized caps and gagged on them; no one was seriously hurt. The candy returned within about 90 days in new packaging, but demand never recovered, and the Holes quietly vanished. They shared that fate with plenty of other 90s foods.
BONKERS
Retired: late 1990s
Bonkers were Nabisco’s fruit chews with the tangy center, famous for commercials where a giant fruit flattened anyone who took a bite. When the ads stopped running in the 90s, sales went with them — Nabisco never announced a discontinuation date, and none is on record. Leaf Brands has promised a revival since it filed for the trademark in 2011: that application died in 2015, the company refiled in July 2024, and the new filing sits suspended at the USPTO. More than a decade of “coming soon,” zero candy.
CRISPY M&M’S
Retired: 2005, and again in 2022
Crispy M&M’s died twice. Mars launched the rice-centered variety in 1999, dropped it from the US lineup in 2005, then brought it back in 2015 after years of fan pressure. The reunion lasted seven years before Mars quietly pulled the flavor again around 2022 in favor of Crunchy Cookie. Europeans and Australians can still buy them; Americans get the full graveyard of retired M&M’s flavors instead.
DWEEBS
Retired: ~1995
Dweebs were the Willy Wonka Candy Company’s softer, chewier cousins of Nerds — the boxes literally said “Cousins of Nerds” — with three flavor compartments to Nerds’ two. Nestlé pulled them around 1995 without ever announcing it, a quiet death shared by most of the Wonka line. A European revival appeared in 2022, but it never crossed the Atlantic: American fans still have to import them.
HERSHEY’S TASTETATIONS
Retired: 2002
TasteTations were Hershey’s first serious run at hard candy, launched in 1996 in chocolate, caramel, peppermint, and butterscotch. The TV ads leaned on a Temptations pun. Werther’s Original and Life Savers held the territory, and Hershey retreated by 2002, adding the brand to its long list of retired candies.
BAR NONE
Retired: 1997, revived 2019
Bar None was Hershey’s 1987 answer to European chocolate: cocoa wafer, chocolate filling, crushed peanuts. A 1992 reformulation split it into two sticks and added caramel, and fans of the original never forgave the change — Hershey retired the bar on December 15, 1997. Iconic Candy revived it in 2019 from the pre-caramel recipe, and still lists it today, though the bar was sold out when we checked in August 2026.
WONDER BALL (NESTLÉ MAGIC)
Retired: 1997, revived 2000 and 2016
The Wonder Ball began as Nestlé Magic, a hollow chocolate sphere hiding a Disney toy — and it lasted barely three months on American shelves in 1997. State attorneys general demanded its removal under a 1938 federal rule against non-nutritive objects embedded in candy; Nestlé complied, and later paid $1.5 million to settle with a dozen states. Here is the part nobody remembers: the CPSC tested all 24 toys and announced they broke no federal safety rule. “U.S. federal safety regulations are among the toughest in the world, and do not allow for the importation or distribution of any toy that presents a choking hazard to young children,” said the agency’s compliance director, David Schmeltzer, even as the candy was dying. The toy-free, candy-filled Wonder Ball followed in 2000, and Frankford has kept it in production since 2016.
HUBBA BUBBA (ORIGINAL)
Retired: early 1990s, revived 2004
Hubba Bubba is the one candy on this list most people never realized was discontinued. Wrigley launched the soft bubble gum in 1979, then quietly pulled it from American shelves in the early 1990s as sales slid. The 2004 comeback rebranded the classic flavor as “Outrageous Original,” and it has stayed on shelves ever since — now under Mars, which bought Wrigley in 2008.
OUCH! BUBBLE GUM
Retired: mid-2000s, revived 2025
Ouch! wrapped its gum strips like bandages and sold them in a metal tin styled as a box of bandages. Wrigley’s Hubba Bubba line never announced a discontinuation; the tins simply disappeared from shelves in the mid-2000s, like so much other gum. Iconic Candy revived Ouch! in 2025, tin and all, as part of a Walmart and e-commerce push.
WHY 90s CANDY KEPT DYING
Line up the causes of death and a pattern appears: two choking scares (Holes’ caps, Magic’s toys), ad-budget dependence (Bonkers, Butterfinger BB’s), a reformulation own-goal (Bar None), and one boardroom’s palate (PB Max). The gimmicks that made 90s candy memorable were exactly what lawyers, accountants, and parents couldn’t live with. Meanwhile a small revival industry now works the graveyard — Iconic Candy alone has brought back Bar None, Ouch!, Creme Savers, and Bubble Jug — while the two most-missed names, PB Max and Butterfinger BB’s, stay dead. The wider casualty list lives in our discontinued candy archive, the truly forbidden stuff in the banned candy files, and you can test what you remember in our 90s trivia quiz.
DISCONTINUED 90s CANDY FAQ
What candy was discontinued in the 90s?
Life Savers Holes (1991), PB Max (1994), Dweebs (~1995), and Bar None and the original Nestlé Magic ball (both 1997) all died within the decade, with Bonkers fading out by the late 1990s. Butterfinger BB’s and Ouch! gum were 90s launches that survived into the mid-2000s before disappearing.
Why were Butterfinger BB’s discontinued?
Nobody outside Nestlé knows — the company never gave a reason for the 2006 discontinuation. Fan theories blame low melting points and shipping problems, but none are confirmed. The closest successor was 2009’s Butterfinger Bites, and the 2024 Simpsons anniversary wrappers did not bring the BB’s back.
Why was PB Max discontinued?
Not for poor sales — the bar was earning about $50 million a year. Former Mars executive Alfred Poe gave the real reason: “It’s because the family doesn’t eat peanut butter. They don’t like it.” The famously private Mars family retired a hit rather than keep selling a product they personally avoided.
Are any discontinued 90s candies coming back?
Four are already back: Hubba Bubba’s original gum (2004), Wonder Ball (2016), Bar None (2019), and Ouch! gum (2025) — mostly through revival companies rather than the original makers. Bonkers has been promised since 2011 and never shipped, and the PB Max revival application was abandoned in 2024.
