It’s Sunday afternoon, May 12, 2024. In one month I will be turning 40 years old. Being a responsible, respectable adult, I just spent 15 minutes chasing the ice cream truck. On foot, of course – it’s not a fair chase if I’m in my car (though I will flag it down from the car if I hear it while I’m driving). But I heard its siren song and had to pursue.

I didn’t catch the ice cream truck this time. I went where it sounded like the song was coming from, but never even caught a glimpse. No matter – I got fresh air, sunshine, and some light exercise without spending a single red cent or adding extra pollution to the environment. It’s a winning proposition either way.

The little dose of nostalgia, from doing something I did thirty-plus years ago, proved to be the push I needed to write this post. I’ve actually been meaning to write it for two weeks or so already, but for whatever reason it didn’t get done.

This post is about a flavor that was seemingly everywhere in the 1990s, particularly in the first half of that decade. It’s a flavor that seems curiously absent today, even as all other sorts of flavors are flourishing, even with ’90s nostalgia a hot commodity. That flavor is wild berry.

It went by multiple names in that time, and was used for all sorts of food-ish products marketed to kids, but I recall a striking similarity in taste from one product to another. Not that there was anything wrong with that, of course – it was one heck of a flavor!

So what did it taste like? In a word, incredible. It was vivid and strong and fruity and sweet. It was almost certainly a lab-bred concoction of natural and/or artificial flavors, but the name made sense, because it actually tasted wild somehow.

As far as I can tell, the flavor seems to have originated with Squeezits in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I can remember having some of that sweet, sweet nectar during a family trip to Myrtle Beach in spring of 1991. Then just a few months later, Squeezit revamped its brand, giving each flavor a character, and incorporating the face of the characters into the molds used to make the bottles which would house their respective flavors. (I don’t remember the drinks themselves tasting any different, however.) Here’s a picture to illustrate, taken from an eBay listing where someone is asking $250 for an empty plastic bottle:





The Squeezit flavors varied in quality. I remember Chucklin’ Cherry, Grumpy Grape, and Smarty Arty Orange all being fairly generic representations of three very popular flavors. Silly Billy Strawberry (pictured above) was medicinal-tasting. Mean Green Puncher was decent enough, but I could never quite decide what the flavor was supposed to be. Rockin’ Red Puncher came along later, and I might have had it once? Not sure. There was also eventually Troppi Tropical Punch, which I’m sure I never had. And then there was Berry B. Wild.

Chucklin’ Cherry was considered the brand’s mascot (to the extent that parent company General Mills still has a human-sized statue of the character in storage somewhere), but for me Berry B. Wild was head and shoulders above the rest. It was my first exposure to that Wild Berry flavor, and it was so ridiculously good.

There would be more. Swanson Fun Feast, a kids’ TV dinner that tried (and failed) to usurp the spot of Kid Cuisine as the leader of that rather dubious category, had a blue dessert that came in some of its meals. The dessert was a very bright shade of blue, even brighter than the electric blue introduced by the NFL’s Carolina Panthers in 1995. The dessert was meant to stay frozen, so you would remove it from the tray and then microwave the rest. I don’t remember the flavor ever being given a name, but it tasted like Wild Berry.

Feeling like a novelty from the ice cream truck? If you got a Bugs Bunny bar, the bluish-grey part (described on the wrapper as Mixed Berry) was very close to the Wild Berry flavor. If you got a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, you would cross your fingers that it was Leonardo, because his mask was that same Mixed Berry. A more subdued variant of the flavor was found in Bedrock Berry, a flavor of Flintstones’ Push Ups.

So, what exactly became of Wild Berry? I honestly don’t know. The Mixed Berry flavor was still being sold in Bugs Bunny and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles novelties as recently as a few years ago, but I haven’t tasted any comparable flavor in a drink since Squeezits went the way of the dodo in the early 2000s. I suppose Wild Berry was just a fad, and fads come and go. It just seemed so much bolder and more adventurous than the flavors of today. Then again, maybe it’s just my aging tastebuds.