Cracker Jack has a new teammate. In 2022, Frito-Lay gave Sailor Jack and his dog Bingo a female counterpart named Cracker Jill, according to the brand’s own FAQ page — a genuine expansion of the roster, not a replacement, more than 129 years after the original snack first made its name at a Chicago fairground.

Why Frito-Lay added a second mascot

The company built Cracker Jill specifically to boost visibility for women in sports, according to Fox Business’s reporting on the launch. Tina Mahal, Frito-Lay North America’s VP of marketing at the time, said in the company’s own release that the team was “constantly inspired by the many women who are making history by breaking the mold, and we want to celebrate their achievements while supporting the progress.” The rollout wasn’t just cosmetic: special-edition bags appeared at professional ballparks during baseball season, and Frito-Lay committed $200,000 to the Women’s Sports Foundation alongside a reimagined version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” recorded with artist Normani.

The campaign has kept building since. By 2023, Cracker Jack had put wheelchair basketball player Lindsey Zurbrugg on limited-edition packaging as the first real athlete to join the roster, and launched the “I Am Cracker Jill” award, handing $5,000 grants to nine women athletes, according to reporting from that year’s expansion of the initiative. It’s a case of a century-old brand actually updating its identity rather than just running a nostalgia campaign.

The snack that started at a World’s Fair

What makes the Jill addition land is just how old the original brand actually is. German immigrant brothers Frederick and Louis Rueckheim brought their molasses-coated popcorn-and-peanut mix to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, introducing it to a mass audience for the first time, according to WTTW Chicago’s history of the fair’s food debuts. The name itself came from a happy accident on the fairgrounds: a salesman sampled it, declared “That’s crackerjack!” — using the slang of the era for something excellent — and the brothers kept the name.

The snack’s real staying power, though, came from two things nobody could have planned. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” name-checked Cracker Jack in its 1908 lyrics, giving the brand what author Susan Benjamin describes in her book Sweet as Sin, cited in WTTW’s coverage, as “a stroke of luck beyond anything a marketer could muster.” And the company started tucking small toy prizes inside every box, turning a snack purchase into a tiny treasure hunt that helped make it a fixture of American childhood for generations.

A century-plus brand still finding new stories to tell

That’s the real thread connecting a 19th-century fairground snack to a 21st-century sports-marketing campaign. Cracker Jack has survived this long precisely because it’s never been static — a lucky song lyric, a box of surprise toys, and now a second mascot built around a cause the original Sailor Jack — introduced around 1916 and trademarked in 1919 — was never designed to represent. The peanuts and molasses popcorn haven’t changed much. Everything wrapped around them keeps finding a reason to.