20 Discontinued Hostess Snacks That Fans Still Miss

Choco-Bliss was Hostess's first all-chocolate snack cake and the most passionately remembered item on this list. Two slabs of devil's food cake sandwiched a chocolate crème filling, and the whole thing was topped with ridged chocolate icing. The company marketed it as "A Chocolate Lover's Dream," which was accurate enough that it became a bestseller by 1988.

Hostess tested a mint version in 1987 that didn't catch on. By the early 1990s, the original was quietly discontinued. A reformulated successor called Choco-Licious appeared briefly and also disappeared. No official reason was ever given for pulling either product.

Online nostalgia communities dedicated to Choco-Bliss remain active decades later. That's the kind of loyalty most snack cakes never earn.

Introduced in 1977 as a chocolate-covered Twinkie with its own mascot, Chauncey Chocodile, these were a West Coast phenomenon for most of their existence. The chocolate coating degraded during long-distance shipping, so Hostess kept production near its West Coast factories and rarely distributed nationally. By the 1990s, they were nearly impossible to find east of the Rockies, which made them something of a white whale for snack cake enthusiasts.

Chocodiles disappeared with the 2012 bankruptcy. They returned in 2014 as "Chocodile Twinkies," then again in 2017 as "Fudge Covered Twinkies." Each version drew criticism from fans who remembered the original. Both were eventually discontinued as well.

In 1986, Hostess introduced hand-sized pies filled with chocolate or vanilla pudding rather than fruit, then discontinued them after roughly a year with no public explanation.

The pies launched with TV commercials featuring a young Joey Lawrence. A Newsday taste test came out in their favor over Hunt's Snack Packs. They were genuinely popular. None of that saved them.

Food historians and snack enthusiasts still cite the Pudding Pie as one of the more puzzling discontinuations in the brand's history. A product that wins taste tests and gets discontinued after 12 months leaves questions that Hostess never answered.

Tiger Tails were a Twinkie-based snack topped with raspberry jelly and shredded coconut, first introduced in 1966 for 29 cents. They were discontinued, revived in 1986, and eventually faded again without announcement.

In 2020, hot on the heels of Netflix's "Tiger King," Hostess brought them back as a limited Walmart exclusive. The new version had orange crème filling and no coconut or raspberry. They shared the Tiger Tails name and little else.

The original has not returned.

Big Wheels came before Ding Dongs, not after. Each foil-wrapped chocolate cake round had a distinct flavor that longtime fans insist was different from the Ding Dong that eventually replaced it. The bright yellow boxes came with cut-out Major League Baseball cards on the back, which made them as much a collectible as a snack.

When Hostess retired the Big Wheel, the company described the Ding Dong as essentially the same product. Fans who had eaten both disagreed.

A licensed version of the Pudding Pie format with a green crust, vanilla filling, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles branding, these were introduced in 1991 as a tie-in with the live-action TMNT movie and discontinued the same year, as they were always intended as a limited release. Each package included collectible stickers featuring different turtle designs. Kids could mail in "pudding points" printed on the packaging for decoder cards, belt buckles, and other merchandise.

The season 16 premiere of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," which aired in June 2023, built an entire storyline around Charlie cornering the market on surviving boxes. For a snack that lasted less than a year, the cultural memory is surprisingly durable.

In 2018, Hostess launched a line of bite-sized treats without artificial flavors, colors, or high fructose corn syrup, positioned as a more premium alternative to its standard offerings. Flavors included lemon buttercream, strawberries and crème, and double chocolate.

The Double Chocolate Cake Delights won "Best in Show" at the 2018 Sweet and Snacks Expo. By 2019, the line was gone.

Hostess CEO Andrew Callahan later acknowledged what happened in a 2019 investor day conference: "We did not talk to consumers to drive awareness of a product that was really good." Bakery Petites won the industry's attention and lost the consumer's.

The Ding Dong itself was never discontinued. The foil-wrapped version was.

For decades, each Ding Dong came individually sealed in crinkly foil that kept the cake moist and made unwrapping one feel like a small occasion. In the 1990s, Hostess shifted to plastic packaging. The cake stayed the same. The experience of opening it did not.

Enough people still mention this unprompted that it earns a place on any list of things Hostess took away.

Launched in 1999, Leopards were Twinkies with soft chocolate chips embedded in the sponge cake. Hostess built dedicated machinery to press the chips into the batter without crushing them, making these one of the more technically involved products the company ever released.

The spotted packaging and animal branding made them a hit with kids. They stayed on shelves into the mid-2000s before being quietly discontinued. No official reason was ever given.

The deep-fried Twinkie was invented in the early 2000s at Chip Shop, a Brooklyn restaurant owned by British expat Christopher Sell, who had surplus Twinkies and a fryer. The concept spread to state and county fairs across the country over the following decade.

In 2016, Hostess partnered with Walmart to sell a frozen, pre-fried version in the freezer aisle. The product disappeared from stores within a year, without announcement. For a snack that had spent 15 years building a reputation at fairgrounds, the shelf life as a retail product was remarkably short.

Zingers are still sold today in vanilla and chocolate varieties. The raspberry coconut version, coated in pink frosting and shredded coconut, has been absent long enough to qualify as discontinued in practical terms. It was a genuinely distinct product, not just a flavor variation, and its absence is felt accordingly.

Hostess has never officially confirmed it won't return.

Hostess Fruit Pies survive today in apple and cherry. They once came in lemon, blackberry, and pineapple as well. None of the discontinued flavors were demonstrably inferior products. Pineapple, in particular, has a devoted fan base that continues to request its return and continues to be ignored.

Launched during the low-fat craze of the early 1990s, Grizzly Chomps were frosted chocolate snack cakes marketed as 97% fat-free and zero cholesterol, each box containing eight individually wrapped cakes covered in sprinkles alongside a bear mascot named Grizzly B.

The fat-free formulation produced a texture that fans have consistently described, across decades and multiple forums, as dense and dry. They were discontinued in the early 2000s. The low-fat snack cake era claimed many products it probably should have left alone.

Released in 2017 under the short-lived "Hostess Bake Shop" premium label, CupCake Cookies were crunchy, chocolate-iced cookies modeled after the brand's iconic CupCake, complete with a vanilla squiggle on top. They came in chocolate, strawberry, and lemon and sat on shelves alongside Decorated Twinkies and Triple Fudge Ding Dongs as part of the same premium push.

The Bake Shop brand was gone by 2018, taking the cookies with it.

In 2016, Hostess partnered with M&M's, Milky Way, and Butterfinger to produce fudgy brownie bars stuffed with candy pieces. The M&M's version was well received. Reviews of the Butterfinger and Milky Way versions were less enthusiastic, with multiple critics noting the candy flavors failed to come through.

Hostess stopped production the following year. The M&M's brownie, the one that worked, did not survive the others.

Introduced in 2018, these were wafer-and-peanut-butter bars coated in zebra-striped fudge, positioned as Hostess's version of the Little Debbie Nutty Buddy. They had a brief run before being discontinued, without much public attention to either their arrival or their departure.

A banana-flavored golden cake folded into a half-moon shape around banana crème filling, sold under various names by Hostess, Dolly Madison, and Nickels Bakery throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Production wound down around 2000. Nickels brought back a limited version under the Banana Flips name, but it never achieved wide distribution.

The banana snack cake occupies a specific nostalgic niche that no current product has successfully filled.

Powdered and chocolate-covered Donettes remain in production. Seasonal variants, including pumpkin spice, strawberry, and lemon, have come and gone over the years. Strawberry Donettes have reappeared at Walmart as a limited-time offering on at least one occasion. Fans of specific flavors are advised to check availability before assuming any variety is permanently gone, and not to be surprised if they are.

In 1992, Hostess sold a Halloween-exclusive product called the Munster Pack: standard CupCakes with orange icing and chocolate sprinkles, packaged in a box featuring characters from "The Munsters," the 1960s CBS sitcom. The back of the box included cut-out masks of Herman, Lily, and Grandpa Munster.

The product was available for one Halloween season. It was not brought back.

Hostess Sweet Rolls were frosted pastries similar to a cinnamon roll, sold in flavors including cinnamon, cherry, and raspberry. They were a staple in gas stations and corner stores for decades before disappearing with the 2012 bankruptcy.

What makes the Sweet Rolls stand out among Hostess casualties is how long the company avoided confirming they were gone. Fans flooded Hostess's social media channels with questions for years before the company acknowledged the discontinuation.There is an active Change.org petition and a dedicated Facebook group called "Hostess Sweet Rolls BRING THEM BACK" that remain in operation.

No equivalent product from another brand has satisfied the fans. As one Reddit commenter put it: "I could never find any brands that make them the same way."