11 Forgotten Cookies That Used to Fill Every Pantry

Cookies rarely disappear because people stop liking them; they usually disappear because a bakery closes, a lawsuit lands, a private equity firm loads up the balance sheet, or somebody decides the shelf can hold one fewer item. Here are 11 that were once in nearly every supermarket, and what actually took them out of stores.

1. Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers
2. Almost Home
3. Duncan Hines Cookies
4. Grandma’s Rich ’n Chewy
5. Droxies
6. Archway
7. Mother’s Circus Animals
8. Stella D’oro
9. Cameo
10. Nabisco 100 Calorie Packs
11. Oreo Cakesters

Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers

Thin, snappy, barely sweet, and introduced in 1924, these were mostly bought for use in the recipe printed on their box. To make it, you’d stack the wafers with whipped cream and refrigerate overnight, and it would all soften into a cake. In 2023, Mondelēz confirmed that it had “delisted” these treats after nearly a century, and bakers have been hunting for substitutes ever since.

Almost Home

Nabisco’s entry in the great soft cookie war arrived in August 1983 in cross-stitch packaging meant to read as homemade. These came in four varieties: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, peanut butter, and sugar. The industry expected soft cookies to take 35 percent of the market, but they stalled around 16 percent. Almost Home was gone by the mid-’90s.

Duncan Hines Cookies

Procter & Gamble started this war and won it in court. Two of its researchers patented a method of laminating two doughs into one cookie—crisp outside, chewy inside—and P&G sued Nabisco, Keebler, and Frito-Lay the day the patent was issued in June 1984. In September 1989, the three paid $125 million, then the largest patent settlement on record. P&G still lost out in the aisle and eventually sold the Duncan Hines business line.

Grandma’s Rich ’n Chewy

Frito-Lay’s soft cookie was the third defendant in the aforementioned lawsuit and is the least remembered of the bunch, partly because Frito-Lay’s actual business was chips and partly because the cookie didn’t outlive the litigation. The Grandma’s name survives: it’s on a hard cookie sold near the potato chips, but it’s not the same thing as this discontinued treat.

Droxies

Sunshine’s Hydrox beat Oreo to market by four years in 1908, then spent a century being mistaken for the knockoff. In 1996, Keebler bought Sunshine—at the time the third-largest cookie and cracker maker in the country, with roughly $607 million in sales—and in 1999 replaced Hydrox with a reformulated cookie called Droxies. Four years later, Kellogg pulled Droxies.

Archway

Founded in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1936, Archway sold soft, old-fashioned kinds of cookies—windmill, molasses, oatmeal—usually racked near the bread. In April 2008, its finance director found the books recording sales that had never happened. By October, the company was in bankruptcy with liabilities estimated between $100 million and $500 million. Lance bought the brand and restarted it with 21 varieties; plenty didn’t make the cut.

Mother’s Circus Animals

Mother’s began baking in Oakland in 1914 and made pink-and-white frosted animal cookies with nonpareils. It was owned by the same holding company as Archway and went down in the same week: operations stopped on October 10, 2008. Kellogg bought the trademark and recipes that December and had Mother’s back on West Coast shelves by May 14, 2009, but the Oakland bakery never reopened.

Stella D’oro

Stella D’oro started baking in the Bronx in 1930. After a private equity owner sought a 25 percent wage cut, 138 union workers walked out on August 14, 2008, and stayed out for 11 months. The National Labor Relations Board ordered them reinstated with back pay. Less than a month later, the company announced it was closing, sold the brand to Lance Inc., and moved production to Ashland, Ohio. The cookies still exist, but the bakery doesn’t.

Cameo

A vanilla creme sandwich with an ornate portrait stamped into the wafer, Cameo held a small and stubborn following—especially in the Northeast—for most of a century before Nabisco pulled it off mainland shelves around 2012. It didn’t quite die: Cameo is still sold in Puerto Rico, where specialty importers ship it to homesick mainlanders by the case.

Nabisco 100 Calorie Packs

Less a cookie than a strategy, Kraft began selling Oreos and Chips Ahoy cookies in pre-portioned pouches in 2004. The line cleared more than $75 million in its first year, not counting Walmart. But the trend quickly fizzled out after people realized that these weren’t the most cost-effective or satisfying snacks. Sales collapsed around 2009 and the racks emptied out.

Oreo Cakesters

Two soft cake rounds around a creme filling, these cookies launched in 2007 and were discontinued in 2012 with no public explanation—then people wouldn’t stop asking about them. Mondelēz brought Cakesters back in January 2022 through a promotion staged at the last surviving Blockbuster, and by April announced they were staying. Almost nothing else on this list got that ending.