The fascinating story of patriotic Bomb Pop and Firecracker popsicles

The story of a rocket pop cold war — Photo courtesy of arinahabich / iStock Via Getty Images Plus

What’s red, white (and black), and blue? The decades-long battle between the manufacturers of three iterations of the iconic tricolored, patriotic rocket popsicles. Thanks to their similar names and nearly identical appearances, you’ve likely mistaken these summertime staples — Bomb Pops and Firecrackers — for one another plenty of times.

And while they’ll usually only set you back a buck a piece, these rocket pop manufacturers have millions of dollars at stake as they continue their frozen, syrupy arms race. Who will save us from this ice cold war, and how did we end up here in the first place?

The original rocket-shaped but confusingly named Bomb Pop was first invented in 1955 by D.S. “Doc” Abernathy and James S. Merritt, for Kansas City, Missouri’s Merritt Foods. The iconic red, white, and blue stack was flavored cherry, lime, and blue raspberry. When Merritt Foods eventually shut down operations in 1991, Bomb Pop manufacturing was sold off to Iowa-based Wells Dairy/Wells Enterprises. The frozen confections are still made today in La Mars, Iowa.

Over the years, Wells grew its singular Bomb Pop into an entire line of triple-stacked treats. A nearly equally famous fudge and banana iteration was eventually joined by a red-and-green watermelon variety. Licensing deals with Jolly Rancher, Hawaiian Punch, and Warheads candy resulted in subsequent treats. Disney even sold a Buzz Lightyear version in its theme parks beginning in 2003. Merritt, and eventually Wells, had created a seemingly unstoppable battery of desserts.

A plate of red, white, and blue popsicles — Photo courtesy of Getty Images / sara_winter

In 1971, Wells won a trademark for its creation, protecting its intellectual property across a wide range of categories, covering “coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, rice, tapioca, sago, artificial coffee; flour and preparations made from cereals, bread, pastry and confectionery, ices; honey, treacle; yeast, baking-powder; salt, mustard; vinegar, sauces (condiments); spices; ice.”

Curiously, while ice is mentioned, the edible ices and ice creams filing categories were left absent from the award.

You need to go back in time a few decades further to get to the bottom of this dispute though. In 1905, an 11-year-old Frank Epperson invented the first popsicle, after accidentally leaving a mixture of powdered soda flavoring he had been toying around with out on his porch overnight.

He awoke in the morning to find the mixture frozen overnight, critically embedding the stick he had been using to mix his concoction together poking straight up from the center. By 1924, a much older Epperson began selling a more developed version of his signature treats on California’s Neptune Beach. The ice pop was rechristened a “popsicle” — a portmanteau of pop and icicle.

After winning a patent for his sugary invention, Epperson would eventually sell both his creation and the entire Popsicle brand to the Joe Lowe Company in New York City. Now armed with a patent, Joe Lowe immediately got to work filing suit against the string of competitors that had taken shape in recent years: Good Humor, M-B Ise Kream Company of Texas, and Kold Kake, among them.

A litigious frozen commodities culture is born

Popsicle may have been first to the sugary and fruity ice-on-a-stick game, but it didn’t launch its own red, white, and blue Bomb Pop competitor — the Firecracker — until 1989, in the dwindling days of the United States’ Cold War with the then USSR. And Popsicle didn’t get around to actually patenting the Firecracker until 2007, the year of the Iraq War troop surges. If Popsicle was worried that its Firecracker was being outgunned by the Bomb Pop, the company certainly didn’t show it.

But in 2014, Popsicle parent company Unilever launched a legal attack against Wells, following the roll out of a redesigned Bomb Pop box. Popsicle effectively argued that Wells sought to trick consumers into believing that Bomb Pops — the original, mind you — were a part of the Popsicle brand, alongside the knockoff Firecrackers.

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Millions of dollars in revenue were at stake here, according to Unilever, which presented a Popsicle-produced study that found that 60% of consumers associated the new Bomb Pop packaging with the Firecracker company. Later in the year, Wells retaliated with a counterclaim against Popsicle’s usage of the words “The Original” on their packaging, when its red, white, and blue rocket pop was decades late to the arms race.

In the end, the court picked both companies’ lawyers apart. Popsicle had to edit its “Original” claim to clearly denote it was the original maker of ice pops, not of the rocket-shaped patriotic pops first constructed by Wells. And Wells, for its part, failed to convince the court that consumer confusion had any explosive impact on its Bomb Pop sales.

Neither side was completely decimated, but nobody was particularly motivated to fly a victory flag either. And worse, while these bitter rivals were busy waging war on one another, Nestle opened up its silos and let loose the Triple Rocket, a practically identical cherry, white lemon, and blue raspberry rocket pop.

A cocktail inspired by Bomb Pops and Firecracker popsicles — Photo courtesy of iStock / bhofack2

Today, the cherry-lime-blue raspberry flavor profile has been repurposed across a wide spectrum of categories, both in and outside of the food sector. Heck, a restaurant I once owned featured an artisanal Rocket Pop cocktail each July. The stacked red, white, and blue stripes tend to bubble back up each year for Independence Day, but they stick around all summer long.

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Rocket pop branding has outgrown the frozen foods aisle, raining down across U.S. summertime culture along the way. And sure, sweaty consumers might not care which brand is being sold to them by the teenagers weaving their plastic coolers in between beach towels, but chances are, we’ll all be encountering these sweet staples just the same.

Bomb Pops, Firecrackers, and even Triple Rockets may have lost their individual battles for rocket pop supremacy, but they collectively won the war.