The Old School Pizza-Flavored Snack That Was Discontinued Far Too Soon
They sure are coming up with some crazy snack flavors these days, aren't they? Even if we narrowed the conversation to just potato chip flavors, we'd still be talking about wild concoctions like Lay's chicken-and-waffle and hot-and-sour-soup chips, both of which insinuate that they managed to cram an entire meal's worth of ingredients into a single crispy morsel.
It sounds like mad science birthed from the brain of a salt-obsessed Willy Wonka, and it may even make some of you wonder why we couldn't stick with simpler flavors like we did in the good old days. Except, it turns out that snack companies making products that taste like a whole dang meal isn't a new trend by any means.
Let's turn back the clock to the year 1968. It's a tumultuous time in history, much like the present day, and amidst a chaotic cultural landscape there arose a food phenomenon with a distinctly futuristic sensibility: Pizza Spins. A brainchild of General Mills, the snack's slogan boldly claimed that they contained "All the true delicious pizza flavor in a munchy, crunchy, mouth-sized snack!"
A bit wordy, if we're being honest, but what a statement. Could it really be true? The answer, apparently, was yes, as Pizza Spins developed an ardent fandom. The weird thing is, they vanished from shelves in under 10 years, and it seems that nobody knows quite why.
Pizza Spins were created to chase trends
Throughout the 1960s, pizza experienced huge popularity growth across the United States, thanks in no small part to the rise of rapid delivery chains like Domino's. In 1968, a press release declaring pizza to be the flavor of the 1960s caught the eyes of General Mills. Wanting to capitalize on the trend, the company crafted Pizza Spins, crackers flavored with tomato, parmesan, pepper, and other spices typically found in pizza sauce. They were ostensibly shaped like pizza pies, but there was a little round point where the slices all intersected that made them look a lot more like wagon wheels than anything else.
The release of Pizza Spins was heralded by a bizarre television ad that really illustrates how much marketing has changed in the half-century since. The commercial features the ominous voice of an unseen narrator explaining that there was an apparent alien species that possessed "a thing that, if eaten, could keep Earthlings under their spell." This thing, the commercial goes on to reveal, is the Pizza Spin, and its flavor is simply too good for humans to resist.
The overall message seemed to be that Pizza Spins was a weapon designed to subjugate our entire species — and that's it. Implying that your product was designed by evil alien overlords is a, um, bold marketing move to say the least. Even stranger was the Pizza Spins box, which had a picture of a pizza that seemed to have no cheese whatsoever.
Pizza Spins have an unexpected cousin in the snack world
Pizza Spins was a flash in the pan. After debuting in 1968, they hung around supermarket shelves for just shy of a decade before being discontinued. The reason for this seems to have been lost to history. The folks at General Mills seem to even be unsure of the exact year it happened, as their website merely states that Pizza Spins were discontinued "around 1975."
The company evidently did not see enough potential in Pizza Spins to keep producing them, but hindsight has revealed that they had a real hit on their hands. There's now a Facebook group called "We miss Pizza Spins!" where fans of the snack post pleas to General Mills to bring it back, and when the company tweeted about Pizza Spins in 2015, users replied by begging for their return.
General Mills has actually replied to some social media posts about Pizza Spins, acknowledging that fans want them back, but they have yet to announce any earnest effort at returning the snack to shelves. However, you can taste a close relative of the Pizza Spin, and in fact, you may already have.
Pizza Spins was one of five snacks released by General Mills in the '60s, all of which were shaped like something else. Besides Pizza Spins, there were Whistles and Daisys, shaped like tubes and flowers, as well as Onyums, which were similar to Funyuns. However, the first object-shaped snack General Mills ever made is still around today: Bugles!