Were Minute Maid Juice Bars Discontinued?

The weather has been unbearably hot recently, and that means that it’s time for a frozen treat. But today we’re leaving aside the popsicles and Italian ices to discuss a product you may not have thought about in a while: Minute Maid Fruit Juice Bars. But what happened to Minute Maid Juice Bars? Do they still exist? Will they ever come back? Let’s take a minute to squeeze out some answers.

Were Minute Maid Juice Bars discontinued?

Before we can answer this question, we must define what Minute Maid Frozen Juice Bars are, or, more appropriately, what they were. Ubiquitous in the ‘90s, Minute Maid Juice Bars were frozen juice treats. They came in three flavors: cherry, orange, and grape. They had forty calories per bar, and they were made primarily with apple juice and other natural flavors (plus some xanthan gum).

What was particularly noteworthy about them is that they came in waxed, triangular packages so you could puncture the top and squeeze out a little bit of frozen goodness at a time. For a certain generation of kids, these treats (ostensibly healthier than other frozen pops because they’re made with real fruit juice) are synonymous with summertime. But were Minute Maid Juice Bars discontinued? Not officially.

So, can I still get Minute Maid juice bars at the grocery store?

The short answer is no. While at this point you can still find links to the bars on, say, the Walmart website, it will inform you that this product is currently out of stock. In fact, the juice bars even still have their own page on the Minute Maid website, but you have to have the URL to get to it—there’s no link to this page from the main site. 

However, if you do click around the Minute Maid site, you’ll see that they do have a few other frozen products available. Specifically, Lemonade Cups, Frozen Tubes, and Juice Sticks. The Lemonade Cups are basically like Italian Ice but softer; a small dish of a tart, frozen juice that you can scrape up and enjoy. The Frozen Tubes are soft, cardboard-ish tubes that you squeeze to enjoy icy lemonade and raspberry lemonade.

Finally, the Juice Sticks. If you’re looking for Minute Maid Frozen Juice Bars, these are about as close as you are going to get. The good news is that the Juice Sticks purportedly utilize the same recipe as the Juice Bars, and they also come in grape, orange, and cherry. The bad news is that they are not bars, they are sticks. Admittedly, the originals didn’t look much like bars either, but the important distinction is that these ones have sticks in the middle of them, like popsicles. If you are someone who doesn’t like popsicles for this very reason, you might be disappointed by the current offerings from Minute Maid. 

While Minute Maid Juice Bars are not currently available, I wouldn’t despair. Food companies are well aware that nostalgia is a major player in what we choose to purchase, so it’s always possible that they’ll bring back the original Minute Maid Juice Bars for a limited run sometime in the future. Fingers crossed!