9 Fan Favorite Snacks That Are Actually Total Rip-Offs

Big-time chip and snack company Frito-Lay originated as two separate snack makers. According to the Texas State Historical Association, H.W. Lay and Company of Atlanta turned potato chips into a national obsession, while the Texas-based Frito Company made a name for itself as a producer of a novel, bite-size corn chip.

In 1932, C.E. Doolin's family owned the Highland Park Confectionery. He wanted to add something salty and savory to the candy, and figured out what when reading the San Antonio Express one day. In the midst of the Great Depression, a man named Gustavo Olguin ran a classified advertisement offering a recipe for fried corn chips, as well as the equipment necessary to make them (a modified potato ricer), and the contact information for 19 area retailers who stocked the product already. Olguin's asking price: $100. Doolin paid up and started his own spinoff of the Highland Park candy company, and by 1934, he had multiple plants up and running making what he called "Fritos" and was well on his way to international success. "Fritos" is Spanish for "fried," and although Texas borders Mexico, Doolin's product is similar to the popular Mexican-based food item known as tortilla chips. Both Fritos and tortilla chips are made from ground cornmeal, water, and salt, but Fritos dough is pushed through an extruder and then fried while tortilla chips are first cooked into tortillas, then cut and fried.

In the packaged cookie world, chocolate reigns supreme. Cocoa-oriented brands like Chips Ahoy! and Oreo tend to dominate, but then there's the oddity that is the Fig Newton. Inside of a dough that's both soft and crumbly comes a zesty, thick fruit paste. Yes, the Fig Newton was truly one of a kind when the Kennedy Biscuit Company introduced it in 1891. The Boston-based company (which would later merge with another bakery to become Nabisco) named the cookie after the nearby town of Newton, Massachusetts.

But the cookie certainly wasn't invented there or anywhere near it. The Fig Newton is merely the modern, mass-produced incarnation of a treat that dates back hundreds of years, to the Age of Exploration in the 1600s. According to CNN, figs were a dietary staple in Egypt, and bakers learned that if a fig paste was baked into a simple pastry, the concoction could last for months on end. Fig rolls caught on in Europe and came to the U.S. in the 19th century, but as a medicinal cure. Conventional medical wisdom at the time held that many ailments were related to poor digestion, a problem treated by eating fruit and simple cookies or biscuits. Enter the Fig Newton, which took the fig roll into the modern age.

Frito-Lay's chip alternative Funyuns are, technically and literally speaking, onion rings, but they're not like the onion rings that come alongside a burger in a diner. They're not battered and deep-fried whole onion slices, but rather cornmeal seasoned with onion powder that's fried and shaped into circles, according. Devised by Frito-Lay's George Bigner and hitting store shelves in 1969, Funyuns are not that different from other Frito-Lay signature snacks — Cheetos are similarly made by pushing cornmeal through an extruder then frying it and adding flavoring ingredients.

It's a relatively simple process, so it may not have surprised Frito-Lay, the industry leader in chips and chip-adjacent bagged snacks and sandwich accompaniments, when it was ready to place its onion-flavored cornmeal rings into thousands of stores in the late '60s, only to find that such a product already existed. Rudolph Foods, a much smaller snack food concern, had been in business since 1955. Primarily a manufacturer of pork rinds, Rudolph also distributes a product called OnYums, described on its packages as "onion flavored rings." Rudolph had already trademarked the onion-punning name OnYums by the late '60s — which is when Frito-Lay wanted to call its identical product ... OnYums (according to The Week). Thanks to Frito-Lay consultant, University of North Texas professor Jim Albright, the company had another wordplay-derived name at the ready: Funyuns.

While Forrest Mars, Sr. lifted a popular English candy to create a new one in the United States, he also found himself on the other side of the situation. Frank C. Mars, head of American candy business Mars. Inc., didn't wish to take the company international, against the wishes of his son and colleague, Forrest Mars. The younger Mars eventually left the company for England, where he started up his own candy company, according to The Guardian, which included among its innovations a bagged, bite-sized candy called Maltesers. Hitting stores in the U.K. in 1937, according to Candyblog, the candy was composed of malted milk balls covered in chocolate. Just two years later, the American firm Overland Candy Company launched Giants — malted milk balls covered in chocolate. Within a decade, Overland would become part of Leaf Brands, who'd relaunch Giants as Whoppers.

It gets more complicated. Maltesers are one of the most popular candies in the U.K., and they're sold as a novelty import item in the United States where Hershey (which bought many Leaf, and thus Whoppers, in 1996 according to the Wall Street Journal) controls the American trademark for "Malteser," according to Confectionary News. That means Hershey can legally distribute both Whoppers, a clone of the original, British Maltesers, as well as another copycat called Maltesers, which has no connection to its English counterpart.

There's arguably no packaged cookie more famous than Oreo. It's as simple as it is delightful — sweet and soft cream filling sandwiched between two crisp and chocolatey discs. It's the signature product of Nabisco and has spun off into numerous flavors and varieties, such as Oreo Thins and Oreo Double Stuf. Oreo shares shelf space with imitators and competitors, such as store-brand sandwich cookies, Newman-O's, and the identical-looking Hydrox. Ironically, that last one isn't an Oreo clone at all — it hit stores well before the Nabisco classic.

According to Atlas Obscura, Sunshine Biscuits introduced Hydrox sandwich cookies in 1908. The cookies with the terrible name take their title from a portmanteau of hydrogen and oxygen, the components of water, and it was meant to imply that the cookies were clean and pure. It may also remind eaters of hydrogen peroxide, or, as was more likely in the early 20th century, the Hydrox Chemical Company, which filed suit against Sunshine Biscuits for name infringement. At any rate, Hydrox never developed more than a small, devoted following in part because they're kosher, and somewhat for the unique taste — the cookies are slightly bitter, the filling not overly sweet. Nabisco took a spin on the Hydrox formula just four years after those cookies debuted, and its take clearly caught on.