Parle's Hippo chips and why they stopped selling - Snacks the early 2000s kids miss

I had completely forgotten about the Hippo chips and last week my friend mentioned it to me, I haven't stopped thinking about them since then and a few other snacks that I truly miss and have been discontinued now like Aliva , Cadbury Bytes and also, do we get those "poppins" now?

Coming back to Parle's Hippo chips, my friend told me to do a post about the same because she really really wanted to know what caused Parle to discontinue Hippo, so I started my research.

Parle's Hippo toasties were a wheat based snack. They were baked not fried, had a superb marketing strategy and were everywhere in the market soon after they were introduced in 2009 in a variety of flavours. I remember how they had flooded the markets back then and during my summer vacations, I used to enjoy the "purple" flavour with my cousin. ugh!

During that time, the trend of "healthy" snacks had made its way in India with snacks like Aliva, baked lays , Monaco smart chips etc. and the trend had caught up fast. Many theories around the internet say that Hippo toasties could not survive the competition and thus the product died down. However, it is hard to believe so and also Parle kept quiet on the issue and never disclosed why they had to discontinue their product.

The packaging of Hippo toasties was pretty cool and their packet was also bigger than the average packet of lays; the packets had the cute hippo logo and the flavours too were unique- Indian chatpata, Arabian salted and some other never before tasted flavours, custom made for the Indian taste buds. Also, each country had a variety of flavours suiting the taste buds of that particular country. They also launched a special packing with the colours of the Indian flag. In short, the packaging part looked sorted.

Hippo used the tagline "fight hunger" and did not lay a lot of emphasis on the fact that they were baked and not fried unlike today's "too yum" where all they serve is a BAD BAKED PRODUCT. Sorry "too yum" fans :))

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By the way, the hippopotamus is also the mascot of eliminating hunger and hence the tagline made more sense!

The fun part is the Hippo twitter account which sadly became inactive in 2014, it has about 4883 tweets - it was indeed very active and posted the everyday gossip in a hilarious way. Don't believe me?

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In all, everything looked great but still the product died. Maybe because the production cost was too high, or the consumers were too stuck on the traditional chips and since hippo was not a traditional snack and somewhere between chips and toasts, the fad may have died down. What do you think? Tell us in the comments section below!

Also, Do you remember Cadbury Bytes?

Read our article about Cadbury Bytes and the Indian sweet snack market Here

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