The Eight Best Discontinued Aussie Snacks (We Should Bring Back)

It’s hard out there as an Aussie snack. One minute, the country is obsessing over you. Then one day – bam! You’re dust. Products get discontinued all the time, casualties of a brutal world of KPIs, competition and supermarket shelf-space warfare. Because I’m so invested in these fallen snacks, I made a miniseries about them (and how to recreate them at home) for my unhinged food podcast, Ingredipedia. While the following snacks are sadly no longer with us, we’d welcome them back in zombie form if given the chance.

Chips these days are so PG. Remember in the late ’90s when Samboy potato chips came with an additional flavour sachet you could sprinkle in the bag? Atomic Tomato came with a sachet of mustard powder; Barbecue came with chilli powder; Chicken came with garlic powder; and Salt and Vinegar came with a sachet of pure pain (okay, powdered vinegar). Samboys’ current owner Snackbrands Australia told me it’s “very unlikely that anything similar will make a return”. But if, for some strange reason, you want to recreate that nostalgic burn, combine a pack of S&V Samboys with some powdered vinegar from a Japanese grocer, as prescribed in Ingredipedia’s podcast episode on the subject.

If sexist ’90s kids’ TV show host Agro was on screen today, he’d be cancelled instantly. But can we separate the art from the artist? Or in this case, the puppet from the ice-cream? Agro’s eponymous Wendy’s soft serve was decorated in the puppet’s likeness (term used loosely) with Smarties, lolly teeth and bananas. As far as nostalgia goes, this one’s god-tier, and was so in-demand it was brought back in 2019 for a limited time before “retiring forever”. Sure, Wendy’s still exists. But does it really exist if it’s not serving the Agro cone?

A few iterations of the Milo Bar have existed since the 1980s, but none compare to the original, which was basically two slabs of compressed Milo covered in chocolate. If you didn’t cough from Milo inhalation after the first bite, you weren’t doing it right. Obviously this would now be considered a choking hazard, but it’s relatively straightforward to recreate the effect at home with some Milo, chocolate melts and the magic of copha. Find Ingredipedia’s method in our Milo Bar podcast episode.

Sit down, kids, and let me tell you about the perfect bickie: a crumbly cookie base topped with salty peanuts, sweet caramel and smothered in chocolate. Perfect as it was, Quatro was discontinued by Arnott’s in the early 2000s due to “ongoing low sales”. Unbelievable! We’ve seen countless Tim Tam variations come and go over the years , but not a one of them matches the textural and flavour heights the biscuit in the iconic purple-packaging once scaled.

If you had chips in your lunchbox as a kid in the ’90s, it’s highly likely they were these ones. They came in plain, chicken, and salt and vinegar, and were a price-conscious yet flavoursome alternative to Smith’s Crisps or Doritos. Today, some refer to them as “communist chips” because their packaging was so utilitarian: the words “thin sliced potato chips” and a painterly image of two chips wrapping around a plain white bag. I call them a feat of graphic design genius.

If you’ve eaten an Iced Vovo as an adult and thought “Where’s the marshmallow?”, you’re actually remembering the far superior version. Made by Paradise Foods, Strawberry Mallows actually had puffs of gooey marshmallow instead of hard, flat fondant and were around for a good chunk of the ’90s. It’s not clear why Iced Vovos lived on and these squishy boys didn’t. But hey, that’s showbiz-cuits, baby.

If you grew up wanting to be an astronaut, it was probably because you thought you’d be throwing back these sugar-loaded early examples of protein bars all day long. Pillsbury, the company that created them, actually did work with Nasa to create a version of these, but health claims such as “nutritionally balanced amounts of carbohydrate, fat and protein” were mostly lies, delicious lies. Still, Aussies loved them, from 1971 to 2014.

We had Fantales for 93 years and I reckon I got the Hugh Jackman “Who am I?” about 93 times in one packet. Love them or hate them, the chocolate-coated caramels with added movie trivia were discontinued in 2023 due to declining sales and malfunctioning equipment. Equipment? Okay, understandable. But sales? That one’s kinda hard to believe. Allens still make Minties, and not I or anyone I know has bought a bag of those in ages. Take them instead!

Listen to Ingredipedia’s Zombie Snacks podcast miniseries.