14 Discontinued Wonka Candies We're Probably Never Getting Back

Willy Wonka, the winsome, kooky, and imagination-powered candy-maker and chocolatier introduced in Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and portrayed in film adaptations by Gene Wilder, Johnny Depp, and Timothée Chalamet, is not real. But Wonka candies, even ones suggested in the novel and the movies, are. In the early 1970s, Quaker Oats launched a Willy Wonka branded candy brand that capitalized on the popularity of the "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" movie. There's no need to instruct the public on how to eat candy, but many of those products  captured the whimsy and fun of fictional Wonka products and became food and cultural touchstones for a generation.

As the rights to the Wonka name and its portfolio of products have changed owners over the decades, exactly what candies it makes and sells has changed, too. The result is that plenty of once popular and very fondly remembered Wonka candies ended production, disappeared from stores, and exist only in memory. In a world where even New Coke can come back for a tie-in, and powerful nostalgia might be the seasoning our cooking needs, these Wonka candies of yore probably won't come back  — they're discontinued and long gone.

Surrounding the 1971 release of the hit film "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," the expanding and branching out Quaker Oats secured the rights to make real products bearing the name and a cartoonish image of the not-real candyman Willy Wonka. The first product in the line was named after another element of the film's intellectual property. The Oompa Loompas, Wonka's minions who work in the factory and sing their theme song warning of and promising doom to ill-behaved children, were the namesake for these small, bite-size candies sold in bags. They were similar to Mars' &M&Ms, but significantly larger and the brightly colored candy shells concealed both chocolate and peanut butter.

The original Peanut Butter Oompas sold well enough that Quaker introduced other flavors in the line, including just plain chocolate Oompas and strawberry. No variety successfully unseated the market dominance of M&Ms, and Oompas ended production in 1982 and slowly disappeared from store shelves after that.

Willy Wonka the character is prone to inventive wordplay to describe his innovative confections, and that manifests in the name of the Super Skrunch Bar. One of the first ever Wonka products made by Quaker Oats in the early 1970s, "Skrunch" rhymes with "crunch" because that's roughly the sound these bars made when you bit into them. The wrappers of this would-be rival to Nestle's similar Crunch bar bore an image of Willy Wonka, and the candy itself consisted of chocolate enrobing peanut butter skrunch, which was a proprietary blend consisting of creamy peanut butter and crisp rice.

In 1977, Skrunch got an upgrade, with more peanut butter and more crisp rice added to the mix; in 1979, producers made the bars 43% larger, representing increased value for the candy buyer. A year after that, the product was renamed from Super Skrunch to just Skrunch, retaining "peanut butterier" and "skrunchier" as its stated selling points. In 1981, the recipe changed again, adding in peanut chunks. Wonka, by then under the control of candy-maker Concorde, stopped making Skrunch in 1981, but a Willy Wonka Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Bar briefly existed in 1982, featuring the same ingredients.

The plot of the 1971 "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" movie hinged on the discovery of "golden tickets" hidden inside bars of Wonka's flagship specialty chocolate. When Quaker Oats launched a real-world Willy Wonka candy line, it didn't release the bar, but rather the Super Skrunch and Peanut Butter Oompas. Finally, in 1975, Concorde Confections got the rights to make the movie tie-in product and created four Wonka Bars. They weren't chocolate bars, but made of chewy nougat and came in four flavors: vanilla, chocolate, cherry, and banana. Not quite meeting consumer demand, they were gone by decade's end.

By 2005 when Nestlé and Rowntree had acquired the rights to Wonka candy, they released the first true Wonka chocolate bar as a connection with the 2005 movie "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Intended to be a limited-time only product, Nestlé considered making it a full-time product because the first rounds of sales were so good. Three flavors appeared in the fall of 2005: Triple Dazzle Caramel, Nut Crunch Surprise, and Whipple Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, and other products. But then sales faltered, and Nestlé called off the line in April 2006. They haven't been seen since, although in 2022, the U.K.'s Food Standards Agency warned that unlicensed candy makers were shipping and selling unlicensed and untested possibly unsafe Wonka Bars, and Cadbury invited aspiring Willy Wonkas to invent a new chocolate bar.

When Willy Wonka returned to the mainstream by way of the 2005 film adaptation of Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," store shelves were briefly flooded with candy tie-ins. By that point, Nestlé held the rights to make treats under the Wonka name, and one of major products it concocted at this time was Donutz. Each package included one confection made to resemble a baked doughnut in shape, appearance, size, and even taste. Instead of being made of cooked dough, the inside of a Donutz was a creamy, chocolate truffle-type mixture that had the same flavor profile as chocolate doughnut icing. The candy coating on the outside provided a sweet crunch, as did the copious amount of tiny, round, rainbow-colored sprinkles that covered every Donutz.

Produced in Brazil and imported into the U.S. and evoking flavors and textures associated with some of the best doughnuts ever, Donutz far outlasted the theatrical run of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." It continued to sell well for nearly a decade, with Nestlé discontinuing the product in 2013.

Willy Wonka, both fictional and real, found a way into the hearts and minds of young candy buyers with novelty jawbreakers. Already successful with the fiction-inspired Everlasting Gobstopper, the real Wonka went smaller but still clever with Runts. Released in 1982, these rock-hard, miniature jawbreakers were sweet and tart fruit-flavored candies made to look like the real fruit whose tastes they were supposed to represent. Each Runt bag included little oranges, small cherries, and iconic, neon-yellow bananas.

The one bad thing about the original Runts: They were extremely durable and very hard to bite through. This led '80s-era Wonka producers to introduce the much softer Chewy Runts. They boasted all of the same flavors as its harder predecessor, and retained the fruit shapes and colors, but they made for a much more pleasant candy-eating experience. They never truly took off, however — Chewy Runts were finally discontinued in 2014.

For the last few decades, kids who only had a few coins in their pocket, or a parent who said they could pick out just one item at the store, faced some tough decision making when it came time to buy candy. In 1998, Wonka tried to make things a little easier — buyers no longer had to choose between Pop Rocks and other such fizzy, sizzling, candy bits, or chocolate. The company first sold a bar in the U.K. under the name Xploder — a chocolate bar filled with Pop Rocks-like, unbranded candy bits.

The launch proved successful, and soon Xploder was being marketed in other territories, albeit under different names. In Australia and New Zealand, Wonka called it the K-Boom. In the U.S., Xploder was reformulated and reformatted slightly, presented as bite sized clumps of "poppin' tinglin' chocolate candy" (as the wrappers promised) under the name Tinglerz. In 2000, Wonka parent company Nestle discontinued the product in all of its forms.

By the time the 1990s arrived, the Wonka candy company had enjoyed a lot of sales success with Nerds. Unique and quirky, they were sharply flavored, ultra sweet nuggets of little more than food dye, artificial flavor, and sugar, and served out of small cardboard dispensers split down the middle to include two flavors. The boxes were decorated with personified Nerds, depicted as lumpy little fellows. So, if Wonka was going to make a spinoff or variation on Nerds, it only makes sense to name them something like Dweebs.

Introduced and discontinued over a small period of a few years in the 1990s, they were bigger than Nerds, chunkier than Nerds, and softer than Nerds. Another big difference: Dweebs came three to a delineated box instead of just two, some variation of punch, strawberry, orange, and cherry, as well as in a separate lineup of Super Sower Dweebs variation. It's possible that consumers got confused by Dweebs, as they were so similar to Nerds, particularly to the equally short-lived Jumbo Nerds.

If you're not old enough to remember Kazoozles, or if they never got to taste them, imagine Twizzlers made flat and without any twists that have been widened out and then stuffed with a similarly textured candy filling. In one version of the candy, the outside of Kazoozles consisted of a cherry-flavored, licorice-like confection, while the inside was stuffed with a different, white-colored punch.

The whole thing was extremely chewy and made for an economical candy experience (Kazoozles were long and generously portioned in individual bags), but they tasted very similar to SweeTarts. At least, that's what Nestlé thought. In the 2000s, Nestlé acquired the rights to the Wonka name and its canon of candies. Some years into its era as the purveyor of Wonka-branded products, Nestlé did away with the Kazoozles name, changed the candy slightly, and renamed them SweeTarts Ropes. That product, still available today, is tough to tell apart from Kazoozles.

Debuting in the early 1970s and introduced by small candy company Breaker Confections, Tart n Tinys were tooth-sized, treats made out of compressed and colored sugar, shaped and formed into sweet, sour, dusty, and crunchy cylindrical drops. In 1977, they started putting them into a dispenser, making the tiny candies more manageable, and Breaker also later added them to the Willy Wonka line as a licensed product.

Tart n Tinys were never a signature candy, nor were they widely promoted and not a huge seller, as evidenced by how they were never sold in anything beyond individually-sized bags and not among the most popular Halloween candies of any decade. Producers tried to update Tart n Tinys over the years, such as adding a candy shell to make them more like a mini Spree, presenting them in larger boxes, and adding blue raspberry to the initial, long-standing flavors of grape, lemon, orange, lime, and cherry. Not even the addition of a chewy Tart n Tinys offshoot could save the line. In the 2010s, Leaf Brands purchased old Wonka trademarks and briefly brought back Tart n Tinys, but that item is now gone from stores.

Willy Wonka, in the original Roald Dahl books and in every cinematic variation, didn't stick to just candy. He made other treats, too. Taking inspiration from that, the real-life people behind the Wonka brand expanded into ice cream in the summer of 2014. The Wonka Peel-A-Pop was at its literal core a frozen treat while remaining candy-like and candy-inclusive thanks to a Wonka-level of whimsicality.

Each Peel-A-Pop consisted of a tube of vanilla ice cream served on a stick. All of that was then hidden inside of a realistic looking banana skin, which was made out of chewy candy. Consumers had to peel down the banana peel to access the ice cream inside, but then they got to eat the banana peel, too, if they wanted. Peel-A-Pops were also sold in a grape version, requiring a pull-down of a peel-like grape skin to expose the ice cream. Both flavors disappeared from supermarket freezers in 2019.

Kids love dinosaurs almost as much as they love candy, and Willy Wonka obliged both of those indulgences in the early 1980s with its DinaSour Eggs. One extra-large jawbreaker came in a box decorated with dinosaur trivia and pictures of cartoonish dinosaurs busting out of eggs. Upon its debut in 1981, the DinaSour Egg was the first gigantic jawbreaker widely available in the U.S. Manufactured as a series of layered rings, the candy changed color and flavor as it was licked down, revealing stages of grape, orange, cherry, and lemon. According to Wonka internal research, each DinaSour Egg lasted for 40 minutes, but tests indicated a life of 30 to 60 minutes, or 10 minutes on average per flavor ring, making for a cost-effective candy treat.

By 1987, Wonka had shrunk down the once massive DinaSour Eggs and subsequently didn't tout their size anymore. Around 1992, the company stopped making them entirely.

Each transparent, waxy plastic envelope of Wonka's Wacky Wafers displayed the product inside: five round discs, each about the size of a large American coin, all in different colors and flavors. Consumers in the mid-1970s got one coin per color-flavor match: green apple, strawberry, orange, watermelon, and banana. The Wacky Wafers were made from little more than condensed and compressed sugar and flavor.

Wonka's handlers occasionally rebooted the Wacky Wafers presentation, making them smaller and presenting them in a 10-pack of a variety of flavors, making them very similar to another Wonka-branded candy, Bottle Caps. The company also toyed around with making them into tiny fruit shapes about a centimeter long and served out of a dispenser, a la Nerds or Tart n Tinys. At that point, Wacky Wafers weren't even wafers anymore. Following Nestle's acquisition of the Wonka line in the 2000s, the product was discontinued when it was decided that Wacky Wafers were redundant to the already popular SweeTarts. When Leaf bought the rights to old Wonka brands in the 2010s, Wacky Wafers were among the products it briefly revived.

In the late 1980s, long after punk music and its attendant fashions made an audacious, edgy splash in the U.K. and the U.S. in the late 1970s, Wonka came out with a fruit-flavored candy that appropriated the music and subculture's imagery. Boxes of Punkys, or "ugly tangy speckled candy bites," as the copy identified them, also utilized the checkerboard pattern associated with ska and the neon colors forever tied to the '80s.

Seemingly designed to catch kids' eyes and serve as a hip, alternative to other staid candy brands, Punkys were a lot like Nerds in form and function. The personified candies sported wild haircuts, and the candy itself was bite-sized and very sweet. Each piece was much bigger than the average Nerd, however, oblong and coated with a rough glaze of crystalized sugar. During its brief shelf life at the end of the 1980s, Punkys also came in sweet and sour flavors.

When Quaker launched its movie-inspired Willy Wonka candy production line in the early 1970s, it left the actual making of the treats to Illinois-based subsidiary Breaker Confections. After a few years of developing the Wonka brand, Quaker rebranded pre-existing Breaker products into Wonka ones, including Tangy Bloops. Available in grocery, candy, and corner stores throughout the decade, Tangy Bloops were purported to be a fruit-flavored and challengingly sour confection, as promised by the candy's mascot, a dour-looking blob with a mouth puckered so severely it looked sewn up. "Tangy" was a modifier Wonka often used to make its sour candies seem less daunting — Tangy Bloops were part of a tradition that also briefly included Tangy Bumps and Tangy Bunnys.

As it wasn't quite a top seller among the numerous other choices in the candy aisle, Wonka producers shifted Tangy Bloops to a vending machine product in the early 1980s. They could be found in coin-operated, twist-and-serve machines alongside gum-balls until Wonka stopped making them sometime in the middle of the decade.