It’s 2003, the siren makes its joyous, piercing ring, signaling that maths class is over and it’s lunchtime. This morning your mum gave you a shiny $2 coin to spend on canteen snacks, what do you buy?
Reddit users have had an absolute field day answering this question and brainstormed up a bunch of nostalgic Australian snacks that you’ve probably completely forgotten about.
Another hotly debated topic was whether the snack selling shed was dubbed a canteen or a tuck shop. The consensus seems to be that those located West would call it a canteen, while kids on the East coast of Australia called it a tuck shop.
Below are five of the most popular choices of noughties canteen fare.
Sunny Boy
Sunny Boy icy poles were a triangular-shaped package of mouthwatering goodness. The flavoured ice blocks came in a variety of overly excited sounding flavours, including Pine Lime Pow, Glug Cola, Razz! Raspberry and Orange Explosion. Pick me kids would rip them open with their teeth to show their peers how badass they were.
Sunny Boy’s had quite the dedicated following, with one Reddit user naming Razz! Raspberry as their fav. “Razzes were raspberry flavour, 5 cents of frozen pleasure.”
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Paddle Pops limited edition lick-a-prize
Decades later, Paddle Pops are still well and thriving, in fact, it’s still hard to find an ice cream freezer that doesn’t boast the iconic rainbow paddle pop.
However, unless you’re chowing down on a 20-year-old paddle pop, it’s unlikely that you’ll find a paddle pop with a ‘lick-a-prize’. Back in the day, kids used to slurp down paddle pops until they were sick, with the prime goal of finding a free Tech Dech logo on their ice cream stick.
Some of the bigger prizes required multiple sticks with joining images to be linked up to make an entire prize. One part of the puzzle was always the hardest icon to find.
One Reddit user reflects on the time he ate enough paddle pops to find a rare icon to help him win a large prize, only to lose the pop sticks. “I actually had the elusive rare middle piece of three to win a gamin console ut then I lost the stick. Childhood trauma!”
Sausage roll and sauce
Unlike early noughties fashion, some things just don’t age. Case in point: a good old sausage roll paired with a squeezy plastic container of Heinz tomato sauce (that probably shot you in the eyeball at one time or another).
There’s not much to be said about this classic. For some bizarre reason, the sausage roll was always one of the cheapest hot food items on the menu, and to this day it remains one of the most delicious.
“The king of the canteen!!” One Reddit user rightly exclaimed about a hot sauso roll.
Yogo Dirt Dessert
Did you really go to school if you never had a Yogo Dirt Dessert? As if the intriguing texture and sweet sweet taste of regular Yogo wasn’t good enough, the creators went and outdid themselves with a chocolate biscuit-y dirt dessert. The popular treat featured a layer of “dirt” at the bottom, which was really crushed up chocolate biscuits. There was traditional chocolate Yogo on of the dirt, and to top the treat off there was a fluffy marshmallow-like goo layered on top.
Burger Man Chips
These chips weren’t always available, but when they were in stock at the canteen there’d usually be a tonne of kids strutting around the yard crunching through their human-shaped snack. You’d probably also find the future-sociopath kids gnawing off the arms and legs of the Burger Man and leaving them limbless.
“Each burger man was like an experiment on how you could torture people in different ways,” a Reddit user agreed.
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