Oreo to Celebrate Apollo Moon Landing 50th With Limited Edition Cookies

The limited edition Oreo Marshmallow Moon cookies will come with three embossed, moon landing-themed designs.
The limited edition Oreo Marshmallow Moon cookies will come with three embossed, moon landing-themed designs. (Image credit: Nabisco)

Nabisco is launching a tasty tribute to the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing.

The snack company on Tuesday (May 14) revealed its upcoming release of Oreo Marshmallow Moon cookies. The new limited edition flavor is set to land on store shelves in mid-June, just in time to celebrate the Apollo 11 mission that delivered the first humans to the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969.

Marshmallow Moon flavored Oreos "feature three fun, moon landing designs on the cookie with delicious purple marshmallow creme inside," a spokesperson wrote in an email to collectSPACE. "Plus, the cookies will come in glow in the dark packaging with anniversary sticker sets on pack."

The packaging for the Marshmallow Moon Oreos shows one of the three cookie designs inside — a waning crescent moon with three stars. The other two embossed motifs include an Apollo-like spacesuited astronaut standing by a flag with stars and a ringed planet in the sky and a space shuttle blasting through a field of stars and planets.

The pack, which has phosphorescent ink so that it glows in the dark, also includes the inscription, "Moon Landing 50th Anniversary."

Although the advent of Oreos in 1912 predates the Apollo 11 mission by some 57 years, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins did not have the chocolate sandwich snacks on board their spacecraft to enjoy on the journey to the moon and back. They did have cookies, though, in the form of sugar cookies cut into cubes.

This is not the first time that Oreo has paid tribute to space exploration history. In August 2012, the cookie brand celebrated NASA's Curiosity rover landing on Mars with a "#dailytwist" social media post that showed an Oreo with rover tracks in the cookie's red-colored creme.

Oreo created a similar graphic to honor Armstrong after his death on Aug. 25, 2012. "To the man who made us believe in the impossible," the cookie brand wrote, adding "celebrating an American hero" as part of the image that showed the late Apollo 11 commander's spacesuited shadow cast over the white creme of an Oreo cookie.

Oreo is the latest brand to produce a limited edition offering in commemoration of the first lunar landing's 50th anniversary. Other companies that are marketing the moon milestone include Budweiser, Fisher Space Pen, Omega watches and Zippo lighters.

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Robert Z. Pearlman
collectSPACE.com Editor, Space.com Contributor

Robert Pearlman is a space historian, journalist and the founder and editor of collectSPACE.com, an online publication and community devoted to space history with a particular focus on how and where space exploration intersects with pop culture. Pearlman is also a contributing writer for Space.com and co-author of "Space Stations: The Art, Science, and Reality of Working in Space” published by Smithsonian Books in 2018. He previously developed online content for the National Space Society and Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, helped establish the space tourism company Space Adventures and currently serves on the History Committee of the American Astronautical Society, the advisory committee for The Mars Generation and leadership board of For All Moonkind. In 2009, he was inducted into the U.S. Space Camp Hall of Fame in Huntsville, Alabama. In 2021, he was honored by the American Astronautical Society with the Ordway Award for Sustained Excellence in Spaceflight History.