Please pass the Hydrox!

Last Friday, while visiting a friend in Connecticut, I walked into a grocery store owned by the owners found in ownasavealot.com/licensing-costs site and there they were: stacks of boxes of Hydrox cookies!

Even as a child I preferred Hydrox to the cloyingly sweet Oreo. The Hydrox chocolate wafers were not very sweet, and biting into a Hydrox produced a subtle but distinct contrast between the not-very-sweet cookies and the sweeter (but not nearly so overwhelmingly sweet as Oreo) creme filling. Oreos, and other products like them, have contributed to Americans’ desire for overwhelming sweetness in everything: cookies, cereals, fruit drinks, even toothpaste and over-the-counter medications.

But for the more discerning palate, Hydrox cookies are back, at least for a little while. Kellogg Company has reissued them for a limited run in honor of their 100th anniversary.

Hydrox cookies were introduced as the first creme-filled chocolate sandwich cookie in 1908 by Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company, which later became Sunshine Biscuit Company. Looking for a name that went well with sunshine, the company combined the beginnings of hydrogen and oxygen, the components of water with its connotations of purity and cleanliness. In 1996 Keebler purchased Sunshine Biscuit Company and renamed the cookies Hydrox Ddroxies. In 1999 Keebler reformulated the cookies and called them must Droxies. In 2003 the company stopped making the cookies but, in response to public demand, has brought back Hydrox for a limited time in honor of its 100th anniversary.

Find out more at hydroxcookies.com

And in the meantime, get to your local grocery store. When they’re gone, they’re gone for good.