Scooter Pie

For those who love Moon Pies, Scooter Pies were a unique version of this classic treat named for NY Yankees shortstop Phill “Scooter” Rizzuto. When baseball was still king and was followed by nearly everyone who loved sports, there were many products that were connected with famous players. Kids flocked to the stores to buy products named after their favorite baseball payers and imagined that these snacks tasted better than the originals just because they were connected with sports legends.

You can’t get Scooter Pies anymore today, but you can still buy Moon Pies. As discontinued snack products go, this one lets fans of the Scooter Pie down easy. After all, the Scooter Pie was just a Moon Pie with a different name on it. While the Moon Pie continues to thrive, it part due to its connection with the Mardi Gras holiday, the Scooter Pie is a thing of the past these days.

History

The Moon Pie and the Scooter Pie are both made using the same base recipe. The snack consists of two round Graham cookies that have marshmallow filling sandwiched between them. They are then dipped in a chocolate coating so that the whole thing holds together neatly. The Scooter Pie has a rougher exterior than the Moon Pie, but nothing else about the product is different when it comes to ingredients or the structure of the interior of the cookie sandwich.

The traditional Moon Pie is about 4 inches in diameter, but there is a Mini Moon Pie that is about half the size of the original. There is also a double-decker pie that comes with a third cookie inside of it and an added layer of marshmallows. The Scooter Pie was only ever sold in the 4-inch sizing. The little cookie pies are still made in Chattanooga by the Chattanooga Bakery Inc.

The company says that the idea for the Moon Pie and the Scooter Pie happened when a salesman for the company asked a miner what kind of snack he would like to eat most. Apparently, the man said something that would be, “as big as the moon”. This inspired the name Moon Pie, which has served the brand well ever since this conversation took place.

Scooter Pies joined the regular Moon Pie in 1965. The company actually didn’t lean too much on imagery associated with Scooter Rizzuto directly in their advertising. Maybe this is a good indicator of just how well-known this player was. They actually modeled the boxes of Scooter Pies to look very much like the regular Moon Pies products. This meant that the overall branding colors were the same as the rest of the lineup of products.

Scooter Pies were sold in light blue boxes with a slightly curving logo that stated that the product was a Scooter Pie. There were images of the pies themselves on the boxes alongside the logo, and later batches of Scooter Pies also stated, “the original” over the logo. The boxes that Moon Pies were sold in almost always showed some kind of cartoon image of the moon, but this was absent on the Scooter Pie packaging. 

Scooter Pies continued to be recognizable and relevant as Rizzuto moved into radio and enjoyed a successful career in this new venue. Various different manufacturers created the Scooter Pie, but this product continued to sell fairly well until the end of the 1970s. For those who lived in the Northern US, the Scooter Pie was the favored choice of snack over the Moon Pie. Some people will still insist that the Moon Pie does not taste as good as the Scooter Pie did, even though the same recipe was used to create the snacks.

Closer to the time when the Scooter Pie went off the market, Rizzuto started signing boxes of the treats, some of which are offered on eBay even today. Most of these packages of Scooter Pies finally showed Rizzuto’s image, although it was a more recent picture complete with grey hair. It’s an interesting feature of the marketing behind these snack cookies that Rizzuto’s baseball card image was not used in much of the original advertising and only appears in these later efforts to keep the Scooter Pie in the minds of consumers.

Other licensing partnerships resulted in packaging that included goofy-looking cartoon characters and TV ads with the same silly figures in them. The colors of the boxes and packages changed to darker blue or brown during this period as well. Scooter Pies were well enough known at this point to survive such a big shift in appearance, which is unusual for a snack product. It’s hard to connect the two different styles of livery with one another, which is a really rare feature of this particular snack and its journey.

Today, sports figures are more likely to grace boxes of cereal or to be affiliated with restaurant chains like McDonald’s. Baseball is also far less mainstream than it was in the 60s ad 70s. The Scooter Pie’s demise was probably always inevitable since the product was linked so closely with the name recognition of Rizzuto himself. It also didn’t make a lot of sense for there to be two products being sold under the same company banner that was actually the same exact cookie sandwich.

Still, if you were a kid in the 60s and 70s, you probably remember all too well how many of your favorite snacks and treats were linked with sports figures that you looked up to. This is one of the things that has changed the most about the snack industry today, as fewer and fewer snack items are linked with famous names of any kind. Enjoying the whimsy of eating a cookie sandwich named for your favorite baseball professional might be a thing of the past, but at least you can still get Moon Pies to enjoy!

Logo

Ingredients

Since the Scooter Pie was made with the original Moon Pie recipe, we can use that recipe here to show you want ingredients went into these little treats:

• Wheat flour (vitamin enriched with Niacin B3, Reduced Iron, Thiamine mononitrate B1, Riboflavin B2, Folic Acid B9)
• Invert sugar
• Real corn syrup
• Real sugar
• Palm and palm kernel oil
• Water
• Soybean oil
• Gelatin
• Baking soda
• Corn starch
• Corn sugar
• Salt
• Soy lecithin
• Natural and artificial flavors
• Color added

The company gives allergy warnings for tree nuts and eggs since the facility uses shared equipment that processes these substances.

Other varieties of Moon Pie will have some different ingredients in them due to the alterations based on flavor. You will find that the base recipe is always the same, however, and the only differences are found in the flavoring in the filling or the coating on the outside of these little treats.

Nutrition

Serving Size:	1 Pie	% Daily Value*
Amount Per Serving
Calories	110
Carbs	72%	20g
Fat	3g	24%
Protein	1g	4%
Dietary Fiber	0g
Sugars	9g
Saturated Fat	2g
Polyunsaturated Fat	0g
Monounsaturated Fat	0g
Trans	0g
Sodium	95mg
Cholesterol	0mg
Vitamin A		0%
Vitamin C		0%
Calcium		0%
Iron		4%

• Percentages are based on a diet of 2000 calories a day.

Varieties

The Scooter Pie was only ever sold with the same flavor as the original Moon Pie. This meant that it was just offered in chocolate and vanilla. The Scooter Pie had a rough exterior, while the Moon Pie had a smooth chocolate exterior. This was the only difference between the two products, despite the insistence of some people that the two cookie sandwiches did not taste the same.

Scooter Pies were sold in boxes of varying sizes. The most common were 6, 12, and 36. Moon Pies and Scooter Pies have also long been a traditional throwing snack that is used to celebrate Mardi Gras. Those who ride floats in the parade can still throw these little treats at people in the crowd because each box has Moon Pies inside of it that are individually wrapped in plastic. Larger boxes are sold during the Mardi Gras season in select markets, and there are also special Mardi Gras flavors that are distributed during this time of the year.

There are other flavors of Moon Pie that are still on the market. If you loved Scooter Pies, you can get Moon Pies in these other varieties that might also tickle your fancy:

• Mini Moon Pie
• Double Decker Moon Pie
• Chocolate Moon Pie
• Vanilla Moon Pie
• Banana Moon Pie
• Strawberry Moon Pie
• Salted Caramel Moon Pie
• Orange Moon Pie – Mardi Gras parading season only
• Coconut Moon Pie- Mardi Gras parading season only
• Pumpkin Spice Moon Pie

Pictures

Ads:

Scooter Pies were sold with so many different liveries because of the various companies that took over production of this product over the years. There are the classic blue boxes without much fanfare, but when Burry’s took over, there were often silly cartoon people on the boxes. Some of these silly cartoon people also showed up in TV ads related to the Scooter Pie products. This is an example of the packaging during the time that Burry’s was advertising using these mascots:

Scooter Pies were mentioned in a lot of different TV shows during the height of their popularity. This is a video segment from Laverna and Shirley:

A Moon Pie super bowl ad:

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