The Squeezit Had a Face and We Twisted Its Head Off

You reached into your lunchbox at the second grade table, past the ham sandwich in the ziploc bag and past the fruit roll-up that had migrated to the bottom, and your fingers closed around what felt, to a seven-year-old, exactly like a plastic bottle in the shape of a small fruit with a face on it.

You pulled it out. It was a Squeezit. It was shaped like a strawberry. It had two large white eyes on the front, a wide grinning mouth full of teeth, and a name printed above the face in a font that was trying to be a cartoon. The name of the strawberry, printed on the label, was Silly Billy Strawberry.

You had never once looked at Silly Billy Strawberry and thought, this is a small fruit-shaped juice bottle with a friendly face that I am about to unscrew the head from and drink out of the neck. You had only ever thought: lunch.

The Object

The Squeezit was manufactured by Betty Crocker, sold by General Mills, launched in 1985 and ramped up hard through the 90s. It was six-point-seven-five fluid ounces of thick, brightly-colored syrup, in a translucent plastic bottle that had been blow-molded into the approximate shape of a fruit character. There were maybe eight or nine flavors in rotation at any given time, and each flavor was a different character, and each character had a face.

The bottle was rigid enough to sit upright on the lunch table for about half a second before slowly tipping onto its side and rolling toward the edge. The bottom was slightly convex. Nothing about the Squeezit was engineered to remain vertical. It wanted to fall over. It rolled off desks. It rolled off picnic benches. It rolled into the mulch beside the four square court more than once, and you picked it up, and you drank it, and you did not think about it.

The neck of the bottle was capped with a small twist-off head, molded from the same plastic as the body. You gripped the head between your thumb and forefinger and you twisted it counterclockwise, and it broke free of a thin plastic tamper collar with a small satisfying snap, and now the fruit character was headless, and you were the one holding the head, and this was the moment you were expected to drink.

The fruit character was headless, and you were the one holding the head, and this was the moment you were expected to drink.

The Faces

The Squeezit lineup was a cast of characters. This was not incidental. This was the whole marketing.

There was Silly Billy Strawberry, red, with a friendly buck-toothed grin. There was Chucklin' Cherry, a darker red, laughing about something none of us ever figured out. There was Berry B. Wild, blue, with mildly untrustworthy eyes. There was Smarty Arty, orange, in nerd glasses. There was Grumpy Grape, purple, with a scowl. There was Rockin' Red Punch, red-orange, with an earring and a sneer. There was a rotating cast of limited-edition characters that showed up for four months at a Kroger in Ohio and were never restocked anywhere ever again, and I have not been able to verify most of them, and neither has anyone else.

Each character was a bottle. Each bottle was a character. You did not drink a strawberry Squeezit. You drank Silly Billy Strawberry. You unscrewed his head, and you turned him upside down, and you funneled him into your mouth. This was framed, in the marketing, as a friendship.

There was also, in the mid-90s, a spinoff called Squeezit 200, which was the same bottle but with a plastic capsule of powdered dye you could dump into the drink to change the color to something like radioactive blue. This was, functionally, a chemistry set for eight-year-olds, and it was marketed on the promise that the drink you were about to make was, quote, totally freaky, which it was, and which nobody's mother let them buy twice.

The Twist

The twist was the whole thing.

You did not open a juice box. You did not stab a Capri Sun. You did not pop a can. You unscrewed a small plastic head from the neck of a fruit character, and there was a specific mechanical feeling to it that no other beverage delivered. The head sat on a threaded plastic collar with a small tamper ring around the base that broke on the first twist, and it made a specific tiny plastic pop, always higher-pitched than a soda cap, always in the same place at the same second across the entire cafeteria. If you closed your eyes at 11:47 AM in the lunchroom, you could hear a chorus of small plastic pops staggered up and down the tables, like popcorn.

If you closed your eyes at 11:47 AM in the lunchroom, you could hear a chorus of small plastic pops staggered up and down the tables, like popcorn.

The head came off. You held it in your left hand and you never quite knew what to do with it. Some kids set it upright on the table like a chess piece. Some kids screwed it back on halfway between sips, which nobody had taught them, but they did it, because it made them look like they were doing something. Some kids threw the head across the aisle to a friend for no reason at all, and the friend caught it or didn't, and the head landed on the floor, and it was, later, the janitor's problem.

The Drink

Here is what nobody wants me to say about the drink itself.

The drink was not juice.

The drink was, in the exact letter of what it said on the ingredients label: water, high fructose corn syrup, less than 2% of natural and artificial flavor, citric acid, sodium citrate, red 40, blue 1. There was no actual berry in Berry B. Wild. There was no strawberry in Silly Billy Strawberry. There was, on Grumpy Grape's label, a small amount of grape juice concentrate from concentrate, added in what I have to assume was a legally required minimum, so that the word juice could appear on the front of the bottle.

The drink was thick. Not viscous, exactly. But thicker than water. It coated your tongue slightly. It was, when you were seven, exactly the correct thickness of a drink, which is to say, slightly thicker than the drink you were used to at home, which was almost certainly a plastic tumbler of Kool-Aid or a paper cup of orange juice that had been sitting in the fridge for eight days. The Squeezit felt serious. It felt like it counted.

The flavor lasted about six seconds. The aftertaste stayed for about eleven minutes. If you ate a sandwich after finishing a Berry B. Wild, the sandwich also tasted like Berry B. Wild.

The Squeeze

The name of the product was Squeezit, which was not a suggestion.

Once you had drunk the top two-thirds of the bottle through the twist-off neck, gravity stopped being enough. You had to squeeze. This was the feature. You wrapped your fist around the middle of Silly Billy Strawberry and you squeezed, and a burst of thickened red syrup came out the top and into your mouth, and the bottle deformed inward with a specific plastic creak, and a small collapsed dent remained where your knuckles had been.

The dent was permanent. The plastic did not spring back. Each squeeze produced a new dent, which locked in, which made the next squeeze harder, which required a slightly firmer grip in a slightly different spot, and by the time the bottle was empty, Silly Billy Strawberry looked like he had been in a fight. His face was crumpled. His grin was uneven. One of his eyes was closer to his nose than the other now. He had been, over the course of eleven minutes, structurally defeated by a second-grader.

By the time the bottle was empty, Silly Billy Strawberry looked like he had been in a fight. He had been, over the course of eleven minutes, structurally defeated by a second-grader.

Meet the fruit

Pick a character. Twist off their head. Squeeze until the bottle collapses. When the last of the syrup is out, the fruit is done, and you have won, and nobody at the lunch table is going to congratulate you.

The Argument

I want to make the argument, because I have been circling it for a whole essay now, that the Squeezit was fine.

Every 90s snack, if you look at it with modern eyes, is going to look like a small crime. The Squeezit was six ounces of colored corn syrup with a little grape concentrate mixed in for legal purposes, packaged in single-use rigid plastic that could not be recycled at most curbsides, priced at roughly the cost of a real piece of fruit, and marketed to seven-year-olds on the strength of characters with rock-star earrings and buck teeth. It was, by any measure - nutritional, environmental, economic, aesthetic - not a defensible product.

But it was specific. And specificity, at the lunchbox scale, mattered. A juice box was a juice box. A Capri Sun was a Capri Sun. A Squeezit was a character. It had a name. It had a face. It had a personality, which was largely a function of what color the plastic was, but which felt real in the way that a stuffed animal feels real, which is to say, only if you are seven, and only for as long as you need it to.

The other thing the Squeezit did, and I am not sure I want to give it credit for this, was that it made drinking an event. It required a small ritual. You had to twist off the head. You had to hold the head. You had to squeeze the bottle. You had to finish it, because you couldn't put the head back on and save it for later, because the drink was already touching the threads, and the threads were already unsealed. It was, in the small ceremonial way that snacks can be, a scene.

And it also, quietly, taught you the shape of a certain kind of American product design. Take a normal thing. Give it a face. Give it a name. Sell it to a child. Charge two and a half times what it costs to make. When the child grows up and looks back, they will not remember what was in the bottle. They will remember Silly Billy Strawberry. They will remember him fondly. They will pay whatever you charge to bring him back.

The Discontinuation

Betty Crocker quietly killed Squeezit around 2001. There was no funeral. General Mills did not issue a press release. One day the endcap at the grocery store was Squeezits, and one day it was Yoplait Gogurt tubes, and Silly Billy Strawberry was gone.

There have been petitions, on and off, to bring it back. There are always petitions. Somebody's cousin's roommate has signed one. General Mills, correctly, has ignored them. What would they even bring back. The bottle is not competitive with a Capri Sun on price. The characters are the intellectual property of a marketing agency that has probably folded. Nobody at General Mills, without googling, can tell you whether Berry B. Wild was blue or purple, and he was blue.

You can find, on the internet, if you go looking, third-party sellers who will sell you a "Silly Billy Strawberry" tribute bottle for eighteen dollars, and it is unlicensed, and it is empty. You pay eighteen dollars for an empty bottle in the shape of a fruit character you last saw in 1997. Some of you will do it. You know who you are.

The Empty Bottle

The empty bottle went in the trash. Not the recycling. The Squeezit bottle was #6 polystyrene, which was not accepted at most curbside programs then and is not accepted at most curbside programs now, and the little twist-off head was a separate piece of the same plastic, and by the time you were done with lunch, the head was either in the trash next to the body, or it was rolling around at the bottom of your backpack, where you would find it three weeks later and not know what it was.

You would look at it. You would think, briefly, why is there a small plastic strawberry head in my backpack. You would remember. You would throw it away. You would eat a Squeezit again the next day.

You did not think about it. You were seven. You were being sold a friend, and you were drinking the friend, and you were crumpling the friend, and you were throwing the friend away, and next week they were making more of the friend, and none of this was strange to any of us.

It was, in retrospect, extremely strange.

But we would remember it. In fact, we are, right now, still talking about it. That is what Betty Crocker was buying. That is what six-point-seven-five ounces of red 40 was for.