Decades Later, Fans Are Still Begging Planters To Bring Back This Peanut Butter Treat

We hate to break it to you, but peak snack culture has come and gone. In fact, if you're a Gen-Zer, you likely missed the whole deliriously colorful, wildly flavored, and heavily processed food phenomenon, because most of it took place in the 1990s prior to the shift toward healthier fare made with natural ingredients. While many of those snacks are still stocked on grocery store shelves (and practically justify the existence of the convenience store), not all of our childhood favorites made it into the next century. One that sadly ascended to the junk food banquet in the sky, yet manages to retain a cult following, is Planters' short-lived P.B. Crisps.

Best known for its line of peanuts, the nearly 120-year-old company didn't veer too far from its star ingredient when it launched the bite-sized snack in 1992. The Crisps had a graham cookie shell shaped like an oversized peanut that encased three varieties of thick, creamy filling: peanut butter, chocolate, and PB&J. If you're a millennial, you likely have memories of demolishing dozens upon dozens of 1-ounce or 7.25-ounce bags of P.B. Crisps as a kid, but the product lasted a mere three years before being quietly discontinued by Planters. While we've been a P.B. Crispless world for 30 years at this point, those who experienced the textural wonder of a shattering crunch giving way to the fudgelike center, along with a rush of salty-sweetness, never forgot about the snack and, in recent years, banded together online in an attempt to revive a taste of the '90s.

There is no shortage of social media content eulogizing P.B. Crisps: subreddit threads, Instagram reels, and Facebook photos of ancient bags of the stuff posted by users with fascinatingly bizarre collections of old food. But the most serious relaunch campaign can be found at the website titled "Bring Back Planters PB Crisps," which features calls to action for like-minded snackers, such as contacting Planters and its parent company, Hormel Foods. Visitors are also encouraged to share posts from the founder's P.B. Crisp-themed social media accounts, which have amassed more than 10,000 followers — a sizable lobbying group for a snack that didn't make it past the first term of the Clinton administration. Though not suggested on the website, you might also consider flagging down the Planters Nutmobile-turned-bar to try to make your voice heard.

So far, Hormel doesn't seem to have bothered to dignify the P.B. Crisp coalition with a response, and what was seemingly the only statement from Planters came in 2017 via then-Twitter. The customer care account with the uninspired name "Jim at Planters" (Seriously, was Mr. Peanut too busy polishing his monocle to tweet?) posted, "We appreciate the love for P.B. Crisps, unfortunately, there was not enough consumer demand for us to continue producing it. TY!"

Perhaps you didn't eat as many P.B. Crisps as you thought you did. What a shame. But that doesn't mean the comeback movement has to die. After all, look at what happened with the McDonald's snack wrap — returning to menus this year thanks to the unyielding voices of thousands of fast food fans. P.B. Crispers, stay united.