Whatever Happened To Pop Qwiz Popcorn From The '90s?

Quick! What's the name of the popcorn that tried to jazz up every student's worst nightmare by splattering it in neon? ERRR! You're out of time. We were looking for Pop Qwiz. Yes, this was a real snack in the '90s. So, if you have a birth year that starts with a 19, you just might remember it. Like so many other treats from the decade (some beloved, some questionable), Pop Qwiz quietly disappeared from shelves not long after its release — left behind in the era of tie dye, Tamagotchis, and VHS tapes. But why? And will the popped rainbow confetti ever make a return?

Just like the color of the popcorn inside its bags, the circumstances behind Pop Qwiz's discontinuation are somewhat of a mystery. Its failure is mentioned in an episode of "The Food That Built America" called "Pop Stars." Pop Qwiz was presented as a strategic play by Pop Secret to get ahead of its competitor, Orville Redenbacher. According to the show, Pop Secret may have undone much of its early microwave popcorn success with this colorful gamble. While a specific reason for its downfall was not given, former Pop Qwiz customers have their theories. 

On Meta, one user revealed, "It burned way too easily." Others agreed, adding that it was too messy. A Reddit thread instead brought up concerns about food coloring. It's also possible, however, that its novelty simply faded. Whatever the case, Pop Qwiz didn't stick around long and was pulled from shelves by 1993.

Before its exit, Pop Qwiz was a burst of early '90s creativity. The General Mills brand Pop Secret popped the colorful product onto shelves in 1991. The idea was to create a popcorn in fluorescent shades of green, orange, purple, red, blue, and yellow. But the kicker was that the color remained a mystery until the moment the popped kernels came tumbling out of the bag in all their painted glory. The taste, however, remained the same. It was a simple addition of food dye — because nothing goes better with butter and salt than Red 40 and Blue 1.

Fulfilling the "Qwiz" theme, the packaging came equipped with brain teasers and various novelty games like Match-Qwiz, Scramble-Qwiz, or Riddle-Qwiz. If that doesn't jog your memories of the unique snack, maybe the commercials will. An eccentric game show host used to bop around the screen, asking kids to correctly guess the color that would emerge from the bag. The prize? They got to eat it.

Years after the Pop Qwiz experiment, around 2011, Pop Secret decided to give it another go with the release of a similar product called Magic Colors. But, that too has been wiped from the lineup. With the current phase-out of artificial food dyes by U.S. snack brands, it seems unlikely that we'll see Pop Qwiz or Magic Colors return any time soon. But who knows? The thing about a Pop Qwiz is that it likes to pop up unexpectedly.