Whatever Happened To Oreo Big Stuf Cookies?

Since their creation, more than 500 billion Oreo cookies have been produced, and over 60 billion are sold each year (per GlobeNewswire). With dozens of different flavors and variations over the years, it's no wonder the cookies have such broad appeal. However, not every innovation was meant to last, and sometimes even a great Oreo product gets discontinued. A memorable example is the Oreo Big Stuf cookie, which was discontinued in 1991.

Big Stuf Oreos were introduced as a limited-time product in 1987 and meant to appeal to people who really, really liked Oreos. They were sold in packs of 10, with each cookie individually wrapped. A single Big Stuf weighed 48 grams — about 4.3 times as much as the regular version — making it a pretty hefty snack. It measured at about 3 inches wide and packed 250 calories compared to about 50 for a normal Oreo.

You could still dunk a Big Stuf Oreo in your milk, but it was a bit of a struggle. Taking a proper bite was also difficult. This difficulty may have contributed to the cookie's short lifespan of only a few years. It might have just been too big. All the same, the cookie remained available for at least four years, which is a long period for a limited-run item.

The exact reason why Big Stuf Oreos disappeared remains unclear. The fog of history has a way of obscuring things, especially when they happened pre-Internet. Caroline Fee of Nabisco told the Chicago Tribune in 1989 that Big Stuf was made to accommodate snackers on the go, saying: "The Big Stuf was a thrust into different types of eating, because people are doing different kinds of eating rather than sitting down at a table together." However, consumer habits may have shifted again by 1991.

Some online sources suggest that sales were poor or the cookie's size was simply too large for most consumers. However, many of these accounts exaggerate Big Stuf's dimensions, suggesting that the speculation may be based on inaccurate memories. 

One thing we do know is that the Big Stuf Oreo had fans — Kim Kardashian even made a public plea on X (formerly Twitter) for Oreo to bring them back. If you're a fan of the most Oreo stuff you can handle, the company still makes Mega Stuf and Double Stuf Oreos, which are as close to Big Stuf as the modern cookie gets. Will Big Stuf ever come back? Oreo has brought back discontinued flavors before, so time will tell.