15 Tasty Facts About Little Debbie Snack Cakes

If you can't get enough of Little Debbie, we have a few Little Debbie snack cake facts to tide you over until your next snack time. These snack cakes have been a beloved item in the snack aisles of grocery and convenience stores since the 1960s. The story of these snacks starts all the way back in the Great Depression before Little Debbie ever existed, and its flavors have wowed us for decades now. They've inspired everything from gourmet desserts to trips to outer space. Plus, the brand and its fans have found ways to repurpose them. They've even sent people to jail.

There's still a lot that you may not know about the history of these snack cakes as they've evolved through the years. If you're curious to learn a bit of Little Debbie snack cake trivia, we've got all sorts of stories for you to enjoy.

While the Little Debbie brand didn't exist until 1960, the oatmeal creme pie had its beginnings in the middle of the Great Depression. Its creator, O.D. McKee, worked selling baked goods at Becker's Bakery. The company already had a hard oatmeal cookie in the rotation, but in 1935, McKee had the idea to change the recipe to make the cookie soft. He then turned two of these softer oatmeal cookies into a sandwich with creme filling. At the time, he sold the original pies for around $0.05. In 1960, after the Little Debbie brand became official, it sold 12-packs of its oatmeal creme pies for just $0.49, which means that each pie only cost $0.04 — even less than the initial price. 

McKee's family eventually bought King's Bakery, which later became the McKee Baking Company and then McKee Foods Corporation. This is the same company that sells Little Debbie snack cakes today.

Little Debbie has three products that continue to make its best seller list year after year: oatmeal creme pies, Nutty Buddies, and Swiss rolls. These three snack cakes have stood the test of time have been favorites since their inception. Two of them existed even before the Little Debbie brand did. Oatmeal creme pies got their start in 1935, 25 years before the brand was official, while Nutty Buddies came along in 1959, the year before the company invented the Little Debbie brand. These peanut butter-filled, chocolate-covered wafers were a hit right away.

Swiss cake rolls joined the lineup in 1962, just two years after the Little Debbie brand debuted. O.D. McKee brought the idea for these back from a trip to Europe, where he discovered roulades and decided to create miniature versions. 

The company makes over 75 different types of snack cakes. However, it's still these three that top the charts, with the company selling over 200 million cartons of them each year to devoted fans.

It was 1982 when Little Debbie was named "The Snack Cake of the 1982 World's Fair," which was apparently a trademarked title. That year, the world's fair was in Knoxville, and Little Debbie snack cakes abounded. In addition to handing out snack cakes, the brand put on magic shows for guests. So, next time you go to the Sunsphere in Knoxville, Tennessee, built specifically for the World's Fair, you're bound to think of Little Debbie.

There are still bits of memorabilia floating around from this historic moment. You can find plastic token coins and the snack boxes that the brand put out that year that explained the history of the World's Fair and what visitors could expect from the Little Debbie exhibit.

If you're anything like us, you probably thought that Little Debbie's Cosmic Brownies were inspired by stars, planets, and other colorful heavenly bodies. However, the truth is that their inspiration came from a '90s nightlife trend: cosmic bowling. 

Cosmic Brownies first arrived in the Little Debbie lineup in 1999, while cosmic bowling began two years earlier in 1997. The first cosmic bowling night was at a place called Boulevard Bowl, where bowlers would play in a black light-lit bowling alley with disco balls and multicolored flashing lights. Even the bowling balls glowed in the dark. These party-centric events usually happened on the weekends, when the alleys didn't close until after midnight. All the brightly colored chocolate candies on top of a Cosmic Brownie are supposed to be reminiscent of the glow-in-the-dark bowling balls and multicolored flashing lights from a night of cosmic bowling. Now you know.

While Cosmic Brownies weren't created with outer space in mind, one product was — and two others actually made it to outer space. Once you know which ones, you might never look at them the same way again.

The first space-themed treat the brand made was Moon Crunch. It was initially created in 1970 to celebrate the 1969 moon landing. You probably know them better as Star Crunch, which is what the brand rebranded them in 1972.

A couple of other snack cakes actually made it to outer space. Astronauts brought Pumpkin Delights aboard Atlantis in 1991 as a Thanksgiving dessert. The other snack cake that made it to space was a mashup of a Cosmic Brownie and a chocolate cupcake: a Cosmic Cupcake. In 2014, rather than hitching a ride aboard a spaceship, a Cosmic Cupcake went to space in a weather balloon, along with a specially made Commander Little Debbie astronaut bobblehead doll. The launch was part of a school field trip at the UTC Challenger STEM Learning Center.

If you've been making small snack cakes for decades, there comes a time when you dream about making a very large one. Little Debbie keeps trying to make the world's largest oatmeal creme pie, and the company keeps breaking its own record.

For its 50th anniversary in 2010, the company made a gigantic oatmeal creme pie that was big enough to share in celebration of the milestone. By the next year, it had made an even bigger one for the Riverbend Festival in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which weighed 125 pounds. Not to be outdone, it made a double-decker version for the Hamilton County Fair in 2023. Despite being 3 feet wide and weighing nearly 200 pounds, it was gone within an hour, gobbled up by lucky fair-goers who wanted to try a piece.

If you thought that Little Debbie snack cakes were low-brow desserts, think again. In 2014, Little Debbie snack cake-inspired desserts appeared at Sepia, a Michelin-starred restaurant.

The contemporary American restaurant in Chicago operates out of a building that was once home to a print shop and has many international fusion dishes on the menu. However, the all-American snack cakes have inspired several gourmet dishes at the restaurant. Oatmeal creme pies inspired a small oatmeal cake, topped with caramelized coconut and maple-infused ice cream, while the Nutty Bars-inspired dessert featured a base of phyllo dough, topped with peanut butter crème, peanut toffee, and a port reduction. honey buns became mini honey-glazed beignets served alongside lingonberries and lemon curd. The restaurant also created a gourmet version of Swiss rolls to round out the Little Debbie collection.

In 2017, for two women in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the allure of an unattended trailer filled with Little Debbie snack cakes was just too strong. It contained $5,000 worth of Little Debbie snack cakes. When the owner checked on the trailer the next morning, it was gone.

Despite the thieves changing the license plates and padlocks on the trailer, the trailer was recovered in the next county after a traffic stop. Despite the fact that the thieves hadn't sold or eaten any of the snack cakes, it still represented lost work time for the trailer's owner, who eventually added new locks to deter future theft.

Little Debbie first partnered with Kellogg's in 2020 to make a line of Little Debbie snack cake cereals. As a longtime favorite, the company thought oatmeal creme pie cereal was the best bet for its first flavor. Once it proved successful, more flavors followed, including Cosmic Brownie-inspired cereal, Nutty Buddy cereal in 2022, and Swiss rolls cereal in 2023. Not surprisingly, the top three snack cake flavors made for popular cereals.

Some of the cereal pieces resembled the respective snack cake while others didn't. But the cereal brand was able to mimic the essential flavor of the cakes. For example, oatmeal creme pie cereal contained oatmeal puff cereal rather than mini cookies. However, it was spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, had a kiss of molasses, with a creme glaze to mimic the flavor notes of oatmeal creme pies. Cosmic Brownies cereal, on the other hand, looked a lot like mini versions of the brownies, complete with brightly colored flecks.

The Little Debbie cereals weren't the only successful snack cake mashup for the brand. If you've ever frozen your favorite Little Debbie snack cakes before eating them, you're probably not surprised to learn that they make excellent ice cream flavors. In 2022, Little Debbie partnered with Hudsonville Ice Cream to create ice cream flavors featuring Little Debbie snack cake mix-ins.

The ice creams paired various flavors of ice cream with popular snack cakes and appropriate swirl flavors. For example, both the Zebra cake and strawberry shortcake roll ice creams have a base of white cake ice cream. However, the Zebra cake has a fudge swirl, while the strawberry shortcake flavor has a strawberry swirl. Some of the other popular snack cakes that were part of the initial lineup included oatmeal creme pies, Cosmic Brownies, honey buns, Swiss rolls, and Nutty Bars.

Since their debut, many other Little Debbie ice cream flavors have joined the ranks, including apple fruit pie, birthday cake, fudge round, Star Crunch, and unicorn cake flavors. You can even find ice cream bar versions of some of its products. 

If you've been eating Little Debbie snack cakes straight from the package, without considering their other uses, you may be missing out. It turns out that Little Debbie devotes a whole section of its website to fun recipe creations you can make with its snack cakes.

There are all sorts of creative recipes for transforming its brownies, cakes, cookies, donuts, mini muffins, and pies. Plus, there are special sections for fall, celebrations, pastries, and snack bars. For example, the site provides a Christmas Tree Cakes dip recipe that calls for blending the snack cakes with other ingredients to make the perfect accompaniment for dipping fruit or cookies. Or, if you're looking for a fall treat, you can find a recipe for oatmeal creme pie foxes, which call for dipping the cookies into white melting chocolate to create the fox face, making ears from cut marshmallows, and creating the eyes and nose from jelly beans.

The best part about these treats is that they allow your creativity to flow without needing to have any sort of baking prowess. Your job is just to construct and decorate, with the option of making everything from chocolate cupcake owls and strawberry shortcake fruit pizza to unicorn cake pops and apple snickerdoodle cobblers.

While we're on the subject of things you can make out of Little Debbie snack cakes, it turns out that you can use them as cake or cupcake toppers. Next time you're thinking about how to decorate a cake, you may want to go to the snack aisle of your grocery store for inspiration.

Some of the most obvious snack cake toppers are the ones that are shaped like something, like the Christmas tree brownies or the Christmas Tree Cakes. Smiley-faced Pumpkin Delights or brownie pumpkins can serve as jack-o-lanterns on a fall-themed cake. Football brownies would work as a cake topper for a football-themed cake for your favorite team. Pretty much every season and major holiday has a specially shaped cake, like heart-shaped ones for Valentine's Day or butterfly-shaped ones for spring.

However, there are some other less obvious options, too. For example, you can cut each Swiss roll into eight individual slices that you can use to make a swirly pattern to cover the top of a cake. Creativity is your friend when you have all sorts of snack cake shapes for inspiration.

Not only can you top your cake with snack cakes, but you can make the entire thing out of Little Debbie treats. The snack cake that fans tend to use most often on social media are Zebra cakes. People have even used them to make wedding cakes. They can be an inexpensive, no-bake option for Zebra cake lovers.

The easiest method to assemble it is to treat each layer of snack cakes as regular cake — frosting as needed. Start by putting down a layer of frosting, then a layer of Zebra cakes. If you want a round cake, you may need to add a few snack cake corners to fill in the gaps, trimming until your cake is round. Then, you repeat to add as many layers of frosting and cakes as you want, frosting the whole thing on the outside to look like an ordinary cake. For a wedding cake, you'd simply need multiple tiers and your choice of wedding topper.

We've also seen a version that is simply a frosted, one-snack-cake-deep tower of four Zebra cakes. Once decorated, it still provides multiple slices of cake and can be quite a pretty solution for making a dessert without needing to bake an actual cake. 

Although there are 75 varieties of Little Debbie snack cakes, your grocery store may only carry a handful. However, you can find many more options at Little Debbie bakery stores, which exist in several states.

Imagine a grocery store that mostly just stocks aisle after aisle of Little Debbie snack cakes, and you'll get the idea. Granted, you may find a few other snack items from other companies, making it a one-stop snack shop. There's also a section of the store dedicated to Little Debbie merchandise, like stuffed snack cake mascots, toys, and shirts. There are often special discounts, and the cashier may even throw a free product into your bag with your purchase.

However, one thing you'll notice is that Little Debbie bakery stores aren't open on Saturdays. This is because part of the family that owns McKee Foods Corporation is Seventh Day Adventist. The denomination observes the Sabbath between Friday and Saturday sunsets, meaning the store is closed all day Saturday and tends to close early on Fridays, well before sunset.

While Zebra cakes have had a zebra mascot on them for a while, it wasn't until 2022 that the zebra got a name. The smiling mascot received the alliterated name of Zain the zebra. To mark his introduction, the company also created a new zebra-themed treat: Zebra cakes mini donuts.

Having a name for the zebra spurred on everything from Zain the zebra t-shirts and stuffed plushies to even correspondence from Zain. So, how do you get correspondence from Zain the zebra? Well, it turns out that you have to catch a real runaway zebra. 

In June 2025, a runaway zebra named Ed in Rutherford County, Tennessee captivated the attention of the entire community. After the animal was contained, Zain the zebra sent the county sheriff's office a letter of thanks for bringing his friend home, along with a basket of Zebra cakes, Zebra donuts, and Little Debbie merch to thank the team.