The Discontinued Duncan Hines Cake Mix That Was Once 'Loved In Hershey, Pennsylvania'

It's hard to beat the convenience and ease of boxed cake mix. Take a walk down your local grocery store's baking aisle and you'll see dozens of brands and flavors, all designed to get cake on your table quickly. What started during the Great Depression as a way for a molasses company to move excess inventory has evolved into a market valued at over $1.6 billion in 2025. That's a whole lot of cake mix! While yellow, chocolate, and funfetti mixes have serious staying power, there are other cake mix flavors that have come and gone in the nearly 100 years since the boxed products made their debut. One such discontinued cake mix flavor that you can't buy anymore? Duncan Hines' sour cream chocolate cake mix.

Introduced in the 1970s, this chocolate cake was described as having "the taste of sour cream right in the mix" in a TV commercial that put the cake to the ultimate test: It was given out to folks in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a.k.a. Chocolate Town, USA. Purported Hershey residents tasted the cake and had moderately enthusiastic reviews. "It's very good. It's chocolatey, it's moist, and I wish I had made it," said one woman. Another went in for a second bite, saying "I won't be able to stop!"

While the tasters may have liked the cake, it wasn't enough to keep it on store shelves. The cake didn't last even a decade; it was discontinued in the 1970s.

While there's not much description in the commercial about "the cake they love in Hershey, Pennsylvania" beyond the sour cream flavor in the mix, we can imagine what it might have tasted like — and recreate a similar cake using Duncan Hines more modern mixes.

Since the sour cream flavor was in the cake mix, not one added by the home cook, we can surmise that its addition is more about flavor than texture. Cocoa is a deep, bitter flavor that requires sugar to round it out. By including sour cream flavor in the mix, the bitter and sweet notes get balanced by a bit of acid for a well-rounded chocolate cake.

Of course, actual sour cream would go even farther in enhancing your chocolate cake. Sour cream is high in fat, so using it in baking adds moisture and richness. The acid also reacts with the leavening agents in the cake to provide lift, keeping your ultra-moist cake from being too dense after baking. In short, using sour cream is guaranteed to make your boxed cake richer.

Duncan Hines' Dark Chocolate Fudge cake mix was our favorite boxed chocolate cake mix that we tested, and there's a hack right on the box that's reminiscent of the discontinued sour cream chocolate cake mix. The instructions recommend swapping the requested half-cup of vegetable oil for Greek yogurt, which would give your cake a similarly tangy flavor. However, if it's a tender crumb you're after, swap again and replace that yogurt with sour cream. Your taste-testers will thank us.