The 50-Year Club: Long-Runners That Still Died
Every product here stayed on sale for at least 50 years. The eldest, Necco Wafers, traces back to a lozenge-cutting machine a Boston candymaker built in 1847 and ran 171 years; the youngest, King Vitaman, held its corner of the cereal aisle for 51. Between them sit a Salt Lake City ice cream, a diet soda, two chewing gums, a cheese cracker, a powdered-sugar cookie, an almond candy bar and an alphabet cereal. The two gums passed through at least five owners apiece and ended up in the same company's hands.
So what finally does in a product that has survived that long? Not one thing. A bankruptcy auction, an owner's housekeeping, a soda-portfolio cull, a company walking away from gum altogether, a plastic recall that, by customer-service accounts, helped finish one off, a younger sibling taking the slot, and, most often, nothing anyone would say out loud: five of these ten ended without their maker ever giving a public reason. Longevity did buy a few of them a second act. Four have come back in some form, though only one, Necco, is still sold in ordinary stores.
Necco Wafers
At 171 years, Necco Wafers outran everything else here by more than nine decades. By Spangler's later account, the discs even went to the Arctic with Donald MacMillan in 1913. What they could not survive was bankruptcy. Round Hill Investments bought Necco for $17.3 million at a May 2018 auction and shut the Revere plant that July, putting close to 230 people out of work. Spangler, the Dum Dums maker, bought the brand that September and needed nearly two years to get the old equipment running; the wafers were back in drugstores by summer 2020.
Snelgrove Ice Cream
Snelgrove's was not killed by a collapse so much as by an owner's arithmetic. Charles R. Snelgrove founded it in Salt Lake City in 1929, and Dreyer's, after buying the company, kept the founder's son on as a consultant. But in its last year the plant made about 300,000 gallons of Snelgrove against more than 7 million of Dreyer's own, and in March 2008, after 79 years, Dreyer's ended the brand, citing dwindling demand. The founder's great-granddaughter revived it as scoop shops from 2021. There is no sign of it in grocery freezers.
Tab
Tab lasted 57 years, and for the last 38 of them it was losing. Coca-Cola's first diet soft drink peaked in 1980 at about 5.6 percent of the US soda market; then Coke launched Diet Coke in 1982 and Tab began a long, steady slide. By 2017 it was under 0.03 percent of Coke's US beverage sales. The end was announced in October 2020, in a cull of underperforming brands that Coke said the pandemic had hurried along. Fans rented a billboard near Coke's Atlanta headquarters in 2025. Coke said it was busy reviving Mr. Pibb.
Super Bubble
Super Bubble passed through a whole chain of owners: the Thomas Weiner Company of Memphis, renamed Donruss in 1954, then General Mills from 1969, Leaf after a 1983 sale, Farley's & Sathers and finally Ferrara. The last one ended the line. Ferrara quietly stopped making it in 2022, 76 years after launch, and confirmed in January 2024 that it no longer made any chewing gum at all. It cited consumer preferences and purchasing patterns; CBS News, citing The Atlantic, reported US gum sales down about a third since 2018. This was a company leaving a category.
Fruit Stripe Gum
Fruit Stripe has the most exact birthday in this group: its trademark records a first use by Beech-Nut on September 22, 1960. Nabisco took it over in 1981, Hershey owned it later, and Farley's & Sathers, which also owned Super Bubble, bought it in 2003 before merging with Ferrara Pan to form Ferrara. The two went down together. Reddit users noticed packs vanishing about a week before Ferrara's January 2024 announcement that production had already ended. Ferrara's wording, a sunset for now, left a door ajar after more than six decades. Through late 2026, nobody has walked through it.
Cheese Nips
Cheese Nips spent roughly 65 years as the challenger. Nabisco launched it in 1955 to take on Cheez-It, which had a 34-year head start, and it rode out Philip Morris folding Nabisco into Kraft in 2000 and the 2012 split that left it with MondelΔz. Then, on November 15, 2019, came a recall of a limited run of 11-ounce boxes after yellow plastic from a dough scraper turned up on production equipment. No injuries were reported. Around 2020 the crackers stopped arriving, with no statement; representatives reportedly blamed the recall and weak sales together.
Mars Bar (American)
The American Mars Bar, vanilla nougat and toasted almonds under milk chocolate with no caramel, ran 66 years from 1936 before Mars retired it in 2002 and handed its slot to Snickers Almond. Call it death by sibling: Mars did not leave the candy business, it simply gave the slot to another of its own bars. The comebacks have been partial. A return sold at first only through Walmart began in January 2010, and in September 2017 Mars's premium arm, Ethel M, reissued it at about $2.99 a bar through its own stores and website rather than supermarkets.
King Vitaman
King Vitaman is the club's youngest member at 51 years, and the most quietly dethroned. Quaker introduced it in 1968 with a cartoon king, then from 1971 put George Mann, the taller half of the vaudeville dance act Barto and Mann, on the boxes and in the commercials. Mann died in 1977, though his photo stayed on boxes for years. By early 2019 boxes were turning up mostly at outlet stores and online. Quaker and PepsiCo never said why it ended, yet Quaker renewed the King Vitaman trademark that same year.
Danish Wedding Cookies
Danish Wedding Cookies are dated by the paper trail, not the company. The earliest trace found so far is a November 19, 1959 grocery ad in Caldwell, Ohio, selling them under Strietmann's, a label of the United Biscuit Company of America, which took the Keebler name in 1966. The name was never trademarked, so there is no first-use date to check. The ending is just as undocumented: no announcement, only a Change.org petition opened on December 7, 2023 that already described empty shelves. That makes the run at least 64 years, ending around 2023 without a word from Keebler.
Alpha-Bits
Alpha-Bits ran 64 years, from 1957 until October 2021, when Post moved it onto its discontinued-products page without giving a reason. When Post announced on April 25, 2025 that the letters would return, citing popular demand, it did not explain the exit either. The comeback arrived that fall in retro-style boxes, billed as limited in both time and quantity. Post had announced no 2026 run as of November 2026, so any box found now is leftover stock or resale. Alpha-Bits has, in effect, ended twice.
Line up the causes and the fickle shopper appears by name less often than you might expect. Only four of the ten got an official explanation that touched on sales or demand: Snelgrove, Tab and Ferrara's two gums. Five got no public reason at all, though in the Mars bar's case the replacement, Snickers Almond, said plenty. Only Necco ended by an unmistakable corporate event, a bankruptcy auction. Fifty years of habit, it turns out, protects a product from almost everything except the people who own it.
The rescues run on the same logic in reverse. Necco came back because another candymaker bought the brand and its machines, Snelgrove because the founder's great-granddaughter opened shops, and Mars and Alpha-Bits because their own makers staged small, deliberate encores. None returned just because enough time had passed. The ones still gone are waiting on the same thing: someone holding the rights who decides the name is worth more on a shelf than in a filing cabinet. Quaker, for one, renewed King Vitaman's trademark in 2019.
Updated Nov 1, 2026