Classic Australian Schoolyard Snacks You Can Still Buy

Picture this: you’re 8 years old and it is finally recess. Time to relax after a tough morning learning fractions and reading Animorphs books. You discover your mum has packed a Yogo in your lunchbox. Life does not get better than this.

Iconic lunchbox snacks just don’t taste as good as they did in the school courtyard with your bucket hat fastened too tightly under your chin. It is the sad reality that we adults will never again sit in a circle of school kids trading snacks- unless you enjoy being arrested for breaking into a school.

However, if you have a kid- or you just enjoy recreating your childhood- you can still head to the supermarket and buy plenty of your childhood faves. You may not get your childhood back but you can get a nice dose of nostalgia or give one of the children in your life a treat.

Fruit Roll-Ups

Name a better way to meet all your nutritional needs than to eat a sticky rectangle of plastic that tastes vaguely like artificial fruit flavouring, I’ll wait.

Uncle Tobys claims that fruit roll-ups are now made with real fruit- no artificial flavouring or colouring. I’ll take their word for it. In my experience, fruit roll-ups were lightly dusted with fluff and dirt by the time I’d finished playing with them, so I’m in no hurry to eat another one.

Le Snak

On behalf of all Australian citizens, particularly Uncle Toby (whoever he is), I’d like to apologise to the nation of France for a clever advertising tactic that made us all believe these were a posh French delicacy. There was certainly nothing French about scooping up the leftover plastic-y cheese with your finger.

A new generation of Australians luckily enough to find a Le Snak in their lunchbox can now enjoy the mental and physical challenge of trying not to break the flimsy crackers as you scoop up the cheese.

Yogo

These things were the BOMB, especially the ones that came with mini M&M's and a little foldable spoon. I’m not sure how they were ever considered an appropriate daily snack for children, but hey, the 90s and early 2000s were a different time. It is unlikely that hoards of 2020s children are enjoying Yogos in their lunchbox, but they can still enjoy them on occasion because they’re readily available at most supermarkets.

Bega Cheese Stringers

Let’s be real, nobody cared that much about eating these, especially after they had grown lukewarm and slightly sweaty after sitting in your lunchbox for hours. It was just a game to see how thin you could possibly peel them. Bega stringers can be found at your local supermarket, and they even have alternatives like lactose-free stringers.

Ovalteenies

Ovaltine walked so Milo could run. Ovaltine was a malt drink that was like a less popular version of Milo, but you’d drink it anyway because it was branded as chocolate-flavoured. Ovalteenies were considerably more exciting than the Ovaltine drink, even if the shape and texture were reminiscent of medicine or vitamins.

Uncle Tobys muesli bars

Uncle Toby truly had the Australian lunchbox community in a chokehold, and apparently still have quite a monopoly on the school snack market.

There were two kinds of people in an Australian school playground. Those who liked the crunchy muesli bars and those who liked the chewy ones.

SPC fruit cups

How were these ever considered a substitute for fruit? Either way, it was always great to find these instead of an actual piece of fruit.

Sultanas

RIP to all the little boxes of sultanas that went uneaten- unless you were one of those kids that had to wait for ages to be picked up, in which case you probably got bored and ate them out of desperation.

Tiny Teddies

Thoughts and prayers to all the other empath kids who guiltily ate Tiny Teddies methodically so that the Teddy would not be without his vital limbs for too long, and hoped with all hope that the pieces of the Teddy would find themselves and reattach in our stomachs. And yet we ate them anyway because they were too irresistible.

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