Junk Food Trivia
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49 free Junk Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
43 free junk food trivia questions with answers. These junk food trivia questions and answers cover the snacks, sweets and sodas that fill the middle aisles: potato chips and the Saratoga legend, the saddle-shaped maths of a Pringle, how Doritos were invented at Disneyland, why Twinkies used to be banana-flavoured, the Oreo's forgotten rival, and the drugstore origins of Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr Pepper. It also stops at Spam, Cup Noodles, Nutella, Krispy Kreme, Cracker Jack, nachos, corn dogs, Mountain Dew, Red Bull and the deep-fried Mars bar. Easy questions work for family and office quizzes; the harder ones on dates, inventors and lawsuits will test devoted snackers. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Legend says cook George Crum invented potato chips in 1853 in which New York resort town?
Saratoga Springs
Saratoga Springs: the tale has Crum frying paper-thin slices to spite a fussy Cornelius Vanderbilt, who in fact spent that summer touring Europe.
Q 02The saddle shape of a Pringles chip is known mathematically as what?
A hyperbolic paraboloid
A hyperbolic paraboloid. P&G chemist Fredric Baur shaped the chip and designed its can, and when he died in 2008 his family buried some of his ashes in one.
Q 03Pringles' maker persuaded a London judge in 2008 that they weren't really potato crisps, winning exemption from what?
Sales tax
Sales tax: VAT applies to potato crisps but to few other foods, so P&G stressed that Pringles are only 42% potato. The Court of Appeal reversed the ruling in 2009.
Q 04Doritos are said to have been born in the early 1960s at a restaurant inside which theme park?
Disneyland
Disneyland: the story goes that its Casa de Fritos restaurant fried leftover tortillas instead of binning them, and Frito-Lay launched the chips nationally in 1966.
Q 05Which cheesy snack did Fritos creator Charles Elmer Doolin invent in 1948?
Cheetos
Cheetos. Their Flamin' Hot spin-off came from a team at Frito-Lay's Texas headquarters in 1989, though a former janitor's claim to have invented it later became a film.
Q 06Wartime rationing of which fruit forced Twinkies to swap their original cream filling for vanilla?
Bananas
Bananas. Twinkies were launched in 1930 as banana-cream cakes, and the stand-in vanilla filling sold so well that the company never switched back after the war.
Q 07Twinkies are rumoured to last for decades, but what was their maximum shelf life until late 2012?
26 days
26 days. Cakes good for 45 days reached shops on November 1, 2012, two weeks before Hostess shut its bakeries, and the new owners kept the longer-lasting version.
Q 08Which pharmacist invented Coca-Cola in Atlanta in 1886?
John Pemberton
John Pemberton had been selling a coca wine, and when Atlanta brought in prohibition he reworked it without the alcohol; his bookkeeper named the result and penned its script logo.
Q 09After New Coke flopped in 1985, the original formula returned as Coca-Cola what?
Classic
Coca-Cola Classic. The sweeter recipe had beaten the old one in taste tests, but drinkers deluged the company with angry calls and letters, one addressed to 'Chief Dodo', until it gave in after 79 days.
Q 10Which soft drink was first sold as 'Brad's Drink' at a North Carolina drugstore in the 1890s?
Pepsi
Pepsi. Its inventor renamed it Pepsi-Cola in 1898 and signed up hundreds of bottlers, only to lose the company to bankruptcy after wild swings in the price of his main ingredient.
Q 11Dr Pepper was created in the 1880s at a drugstore soda fountain in which Texas city?
Waco
Customers at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store originally ordered it by asking for 'a Waco'.
Q 12Which citrus soda's name was 19th-century slang for moonshine?
Mountain Dew
Mountain Dew. Knoxville bottlers Barney and Ally Hartman made the lemon-lime drink as a mixer for liquor and jokingly gave it the bootleggers' nickname, with a barefoot hillbilly on the label.
Q 13Red Bull was adapted from Krating Daeng, an energy tonic invented in 1976 in which country?
Thailand
Thailand. Austrian marketer Dietrich Mateschitz found the tonic eased his jet lag on a business trip, partnered with its inventor, a former duck farmer, and reworked it for the West.
Q 21Krispy Kreme opened its first store in 1937 in which North Carolina city?
Winston-Salem
Winston-Salem. Vernon Rudolph set out as a wholesaler, but the smell of fresh doughnuts drew so many callers that he cut a hole in the bakery wall and sold them through a window.
Q 22New England sea captain Hanson Gregory claimed to have invented which snack shape with a tin pepper box?
The ring doughnut
The ring doughnut. Gregory said the doughnuts of his day stayed raw in the middle, so he cut the middle out, making what he called the first doughnut hole ever seen by mortal eyes.
Q 23Which 1908 song gave Cracker Jack free publicity in its chorus?
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
Q 14Which powdered drink mix, invented in the town of Hastings, is Nebraska's official soft drink?
Kool-Aid
Kool-Aid. Edwin Perkins had been selling a bottled syrup called Fruit Smack, and he dried it to a powder because the glass bottles were heavy, leaked and broke in transit.
Q 15Which convenience store chain licensed the Icee machine in the 1960s and sold the frozen drink under its own name?
7-Eleven
7-Eleven sold it as the Slurpee. The machine came from a Kansas Dairy Queen owner whose soda fountain broke, so he served bottles half-frozen from the freezer and customers loved them.
Q 16Which US state has long eaten the most Spam per person?
Hawaii
Hawaii. The canned meat caught on there during World War II and never left, turning up today as musubi, a slice on a block of rice wrapped in seaweed.
Q 17Which company introduced Spam in 1937?
Hormel
Hormel got the name from actor Ken Daigneau, the brother of one of its executives; it is widely read as 'spiced ham', though the company says only a few insiders know for sure.
Q 18Momofuku Ando invented instant noodles in 1958 and Cup Noodles in 1971 as founder of which company?
Nissin
Nissin. Ando got the idea from watching hungry people queue in the cold for ramen in postwar Osaka, and perfected his dried noodles in a shed behind his house.
Q 19Which country ate the most instant noodles in 2025, about 43 billion servings?
China
China, counted with Hong Kong, ate about a third of the world's 124 billion servings, while Japan, where the noodles were invented, ranked only fifth.
Q 20Nutella was launched in 1964 by which Italian company?
Ferrero
Ferrero. With cocoa scarce and costly after the war, Pietro Ferrero stretched it with local hazelnuts, first as a foil-wrapped loaf cut with a knife, and the later spreadable version became Nutella.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Lyricist Jack Norworth said he scribbled it on the subway after spotting a sign for a game, though by his own account he had never been to one.
Q 24How much did Charles Elmer Doolin pay in 1932 for the recipe and equipment that became Fritos?
$100
$100 bought the recipe, a converted potato ricer and a handful of retail accounts from Gustavo Olguin, a soccer coach who was selling up to go home to Mexico.
Q 25Which snack is Ignacio Anaya said to have improvised for a group of US officers' wives when the cook couldn't be found?
Nachos
Nachos. Anaya, nicknamed Nacho, melted cheese over fried tortilla pieces with a slice of jalapeño at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, and the dish took his name.
Q 26Which snack on a stick did the Fletcher brothers bring to the State Fair of Texas in the early 1940s?
Corn dog
The corn dog. The Fletchers sold theirs as Corny Dogs, but Oregon's Pronto Pup makes a rival claim, and food historians say nobody knows who really dipped the first one.
Q 27The deep-fried Mars bar first made headlines in 1995 at a chip shop in which country?
Scotland
Scotland. Two doctors who suspected the snack was an urban myth surveyed the country's chip shops in 2004 and found more than a fifth of them selling it.
Q 28Pop-Tarts were rushed to market in 1964 by Kellogg's to beat a rival product from which company?
Post
Post announced its 'Country Squares' too early; Kellogg's built its version in four months, and frosting that survived the toaster arrived in 1967.
Q 29Which humor columnist showed in the early 1990s that a strawberry Pop-Tart stuck in a toaster would shoot out flames?
Dave Barry
Dave Barry. A Texas professor then repeated his stunt as a mock experiment and reported flames up to 18 inches high from a single pastry.
Q 30Which cheese cracker did Dayton's Green & Green Company launch in 1921?
Cheez-It
Cheez-It. The name meant nothing to shoppers at first, so the makers pitched it as a 'baked rarebit': melted cheese on toast, shrunk into a cracker that would keep.