How toy and game companies are winning back their grown-up former customers

I was on vacation and hanging out quietly in the hotel room with my friend when, out of nowhere, she screamed "Zoo Pals are back!"

We immediately tried to buy some. But to our misfortune, they were sold out. For days we refreshed the page to see if they were back in stock. Sure enough, I got my Zoo Pals a few weeks later.

I'm almost embarrassed to share that Zoo Pals are paper plates that feature the bright, adorable faces of animals like pigs, turtles, ducks and whales. Each plate has one main section and two subsections for the animal's ears or feet. In 2014, Hefty, the maker of Zoo Pals, discontinued them.

As a child, Zoo Pals were a game-changer. That meant broccoli didn't have to, God forbid, touch my chicken nuggets, and they also provided a special area for dipping the nuggets in ketchup. And I had an incentive to finish my plate so I could see my Zoo Pal's face again.

As an adult, I no longer have such needs. But $6.99 was a small price to pay for a walk down memory lane.

Adults are increasingly shelling out for relics of their youth and for items, ranging from flip phones to film cameras to Tamagotchis, that evoke a late 20th-century or turn-of-the century nostalgia. That demand has created a treasure-trove of sales in particular for toys and products, like my Zoo Pals, originally geared to children.

Toy recipients ages 18 and up - also known as "kidults" - represented about 17% of total toy sales in the United States for the 12 months ending in June 2023, according to data consumer research group Circana shared with CNN. That's up four percentage points from 2021 and up a whopping eight percentage points from 2019.