Fruit Stripes were fun. Customers could give themselves temporary tattoos with the gum wrappers of the brand’s mascot, Yipes the Zebra, playing basketball, biking or doing something active.
“Tattoos inside!” one package read. “Wet ’em and Wear ’em.”
Fruit Stripes were colorful. The packs — with as many as 17 gum strips — came with five colors and flavors of gum with zebra stripes to resemble Yipes, such as “Wet ’n’ Wild Melon,” cherry, lemon, orange and peach.
“Yipes! Stripes! Fruit-striped gum,” one advertisement from 1991 sang. “It’s a yummy fruity one.”
Fruit Stripes were flavorful — until they notoriously weren’t, often just a few chews later.
In the fall of 2021, Greg Guidotti, then the general manager of Ferrara’s sugar portfolio and now the company’s chief marketing officer, told Food Business News that Fruit Stripe sales were up 4.5 percent. Ferrara at the time was launching Fruit Stripe gummies, which were “more relevant to consumers today,” Guidotti told the site.
Ferrara’s website appears to have taken down the brand’s site, though it still shows the gum in an image of its suite of candies that include SweeTarts, Nerds and Lemonheads.
This week’s decision to “sunset this product was not taken lightly,” Brian Camen, a Ferrara spokesman, said in a statement.
“We have made the difficult decision to sunset Fruit Stripe Gum, but consumers may still be able to find product at select retailers nationwide,” Camen said. Amazon, Walmart and other large retailers listed Fruit Stripes as unavailable as of Friday.
