Major food companies employ virtual armies of chefs, food scientists, and marketing gurus dedicated to developing, test-marketing, and (if all goes well) eventually rolling out new products. Both salty and sweet, and sometimes both at once, these items tend to tempt consumers into eating more sugar, salt, and/or fat that is good for them. 

Along the way, though, they also please us with their vivid flavors and attractive textures — and when they eventually disappear from the shelves, as many of them do, we end up missing them, even though we realize that they’re not exactly constituents of a healthy diet. (Sometimes, though, there are healthy versions of old-school junk-food snacks.)

While some of these products might seem like innovations, most are simply variations on existing ones, imbued with new flavorings or produced in different shapes or sizes.

Why do such snack foods get discontinued? In most cases, it’s simply a matter of sales. They just don’t generate the revenue that projections called for, and so are phased out in favor of the tried-and-true, or of other new introductions that might end up doing better.

24/7 Tempo consulted numerous snack food fan pages, company histories, and rating sites to compile this list of chips, candies, and other such items that we wish we could eat again right now.

Sometimes we get the chance. Scrapped products may be brought back in some cases, either in their original form or with slight variations (or new names). Consider, for example, the saga of the Mars candy company’s Peanut Butter Twix — which has been on and off the market numerous times since its debut in the 1980s.

Click here to see 40 discontinued snack foods we really miss.

Fans of discontinued snack foods have several options: Sometimes the products are still made  in other countries, such as Mexico, Canada, or Australia, and these may be available by mail order. On the other hand, there are numerous products you can’t find outside of America.

Collectors also sell unopened packages of the original on eBay and other sites — and some aficionados turn to crowd-sourcing platforms like change.org and ipetitions.com to beg companies to gear up production of their favorites again.