- A nostalgic trip down memory lane
For purely research purposes, for the duration of the following week we tried a number of TipiTip packets from a few different outlets, alternating between the Cheesy Balls and the beloved Onion Stars, and we noticed that the taste has changed quite a bit. Maybe it’s the nostalgia speaking, but have they made the Onion Stars smaller? And are the Cheese Balls less cheesy, now leaving a bland aftertaste in your mouth? Or do we no longer have childlike taste buds and has our age caught up to our tongues?
Regardless, this got us thinking about what kind of snacks children enjoy nowadays, considering they certainly do have a far wider variety of options and also the opportunity to try more imported foods as well; we wondered if kids still enjoy some of these snacks from our childhood.
If you grew up in the ‘90s or early 2000s, you are sure to have a few iconic snacks that would drown you in nostalgic bliss if you are to come across any one of those now, TipiTip being at the top of that list, along with the Rs. 5 ice packets – when Rs. 15 for the Jumbo Jolly was a little too steep, this would tide one over quite nicely. While personally a fan of the wood apple-flavoured ones, we were all really just eating a whole lot of ice and suffering tonsils for days after.
Then of course there were the Gem biscuits and jujubes – the latter of which, to be honest, was never all that great (but a whole lot of people used to swear by them) because the texture was just a little too strange for our liking. There were of course the wonderfully affordable Rs. 5 Kandos Tintin chocolates – whatever happened to those? They were delicious and somehow superior to the bigger Kandos slabs. There were a ton of others of course; excessive devouring of Polo as we recited the advertisement whenever Polo was in our vicinity: “Gamperaliya nevei pem peraliya.” Choconuts and Chocolate Fingers also sort of qualify in this category.
How many of these relics from this golden era of snacks have stood the test of time? Or is it just so precious for us ‘90s kids and there’s just far better stuff now? After some digging, it turns out children aren’t all that different, whether they were growing up in the ‘90s or the 2000s – kids like multicoloured unhealthy snacks full of preservatives.
In our journey through Colombo eating TipiTip we chatted with some of the grocery store owners who are the first-line defenders against hungry young Zoomers, or if we’re being more accurate, we’re ideally looking at Generation Alpha (children born between 2011 and 2025).
According to Anura Bharatha of Bambalapitiya, Gen A tends to have rather restricted diets, with their parents being a lot stricter on what they consume. Gen A wouldn’t be caught dead eating jujubes, but apparently even they aren’t immune to the charms of the TipiTip. “Back in the day, children loved small chocolates wrapped in shiny wrappers, they liked small balls of sweets that are on display in transparent bottles, but now, kids like the larger sweets that come in packaging, but TipiTip is something that has never gone out of demand. However, parents don’t allow it as much,” he said, adding: “They still really like Chocolate Fingers, and the bigger Kandos chocolate bars, but they also have new favourites.”
These new favorites turned out to be things like Stix – the candy-striped wafer, chocolatey biscuits like Chocolate Puff, and surprisingly, a whole lot of Mentos. As for drinks, Mountain Dew remains a fan favorite, but parents simply do not allow kids to just go buck wild and have all the sugar they want.
Speaking to another vendor, Susantha Premaratne in Wellawatte, he shared that since he has a lot of loose sweets, milk toffee is a common item that kids enjoy – and actually some kids enjoy a lot of what their parents like, so much so that there are five-year-olds who like toffees like Hacks toffee – and most kids really enjoy any kind of lollipop. “Parents come in and tell their kids ‘The Hacks toffee is good for you; it will help you with your cough’ and the kid just settles for it,” he said, adding that toffees like Delta, chewy harder toffees that were once popular, are still enjoyed, but not by kids. “We have a lot of young people, like mid to late 20s, who come in after lunch and just buy a bag of Delta,” he said.
We also spoke to some young parents to get an idea of what their kids actually enjoy, despite them not getting to have it all the time – what do their little hearts desire?
Niveda Rajeshwaran, who has a seven-year-old, shared with us that she tries not to feed her kids too many processed foods. “Um, he’s not allowed those things, maybe once in a while. He has never had Pringles, TipiTip, and potato chips, the ones with the nitrogen in their packaging, but we give him things like custard biscuits but he just licks the cream filling. But he loves anything chocolate, particularly chocolate biscuits and cookies, mostly things that have some texture to it.” She said that if he had his way, he would likely be eating a diet entirely consisting of TipiTip and Chocolate Fingers.
Nimesha Perera, a mother of two, a teenager and another just turning 12, said that since her kids are a little older she doesn’t limit what they have. “They eat a lot of stuff from their school canteen even if I don’t buy things at home,” adding: “They drink a lot of Milo and eat ice cream, but my kids don’t like fruity popsicles – they prefer the dairy ice creams and chocolatey items.” She also said that they try to buy a lot of the imported chocolates at the supermarket, and from the local snacks, they like biscuits a lot.
Since the parents we spoke to all shared that their kids love biscuits, we asked if they liked Lemon Puff, which as we all know was a favourite back then with the commercial being etched into our brains. Turns out kids nowadays don’t care all that much about Lemon Puff. We fed a Lemon Puff to one of our neighbour’s kids who had never tried it before – a 10-year-old who had never had Lemon Puff! He said that it had “too much biscuit in the puff” and the cream wasn’t anything to comment on. He said he doesn’t want to have it again. Our hearts collectively shattered into a million pieces.
We also spoke with Melanie Dassanayake, a preschool teacher who shared that children nowadays just have too many options to have any key highlights. She said that their nostalgic treats would likely be things like Kinder eggs, Cadbury chocolates, and local sweets like Stix. Dassanayake said that they still love those older favourites. “They are still kids, they love bright colours, a lot of sugar, and chocolate, but they just have too many choices I think for anything to evoke a particularly fond memory, unless they’ve attached it to a notably special moment. Kids just have so many options that they don’t feel particularly nostalgic towards anything,” she said.
Maybe Dassanayake is right and kids nowadays won’t be suffering from nostalgia considering the sheer multitude of options they have on hand, or maybe, it’s just too soon to tell. Maybe in another 20 years, it would come to light that a few odd-ball snacks have really made an impact in these kids’ lives and just as we are doing now, they’ll complain about how the quality is just not as good and wonder if kids still love it as they once did.