Scooby Snacks – aka Scooby Snax – began as a fictional food item, but now include a Warner Bros. licensed dog treat (made by Snausages, a subsiduary of Del Monte Foods), a vanilla wafer cookie snack with the same name and Graham cracker sticks.
Scooby Snacks are used as a form of incentive payment for the cartoon characters Scooby-Doo and Shaggy, starting in the Hanna-Barbera series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and its various spin-offs.
‘Scooby Snacks’ is also a 1996 song by the band Fun Lovin’ Criminals.
In June 2016, the term ‘Scooby Snack’ was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Producer William Hanna had always imagined that a “Scooby Snack” would taste like some sort of a caramel-flavoured cookie (however, the batter is coloured like brown sugar and similar in colour to butterscotch), and he and Joseph Barbera had previously used the concept of a dog, Snuffles, that goes wild for doggie treats in the Quick Draw McGraw series in 1959.
In A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, a treat known as Mellow Mutt Munchie was offered as an alternative to the Scooby Snack. They appeared in the episode “The Return of Commander Cool”, where an amnesiac Shaggy believed himself to be his favourite superhero Commander Cool and Scooby to be Mellow Mutt and, as a consequence, wouldn’t allow Scooby to eat a Scooby Snack. Scooby reacted to the Mellow Mutt Munchie the same way he does with the Scooby Snacks.
In another episode, “Wrestle Maniacs”, despite no longer being amnesiac, Shaggy tried to offer a Mellow Mutt Munchie instead of the traditional Scooby Snack but his Mellow Mutt Munchie box was empty so Daphne offered a Scooby Snack anyway.
In Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins it is revealed that Shaggy made up the recipe which includes eggs, water, flour, cocoa, sugar, and dog kibble for texture.
In Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!, it is shown that the recipe for Scooby Snacks comes from Sorcerer Snacks who were renamed for Scooby-Doo after the gang solves the mystery of who was trying to sabotage their production.
Scooby Snacks seem to come in many different flavours (although all boxes are identical), and in one of the later episodes, “Recipe for Disaster”, Scooby and Shaggy are ecstatic when Shaggy wins a tour of the Scooby Snacks factory where they attempt to sample the batter pre-cooking before being shooed off by an irate worker who thinks they are trying to steal the recipe.
