Ellia Kassoff’s affinity for Hydrox cookies dates back to his boyhood in Palm Springs.

Hydrox was kosher. The look-alike Oreos weren’t.

For a Jewish boy like Kassoff, that left little doubt about what to dunk in his milk.

The cream-filled chocolate snack billed as “the original sandwich cookie” was a special treat he’d get with lunch or after school every other day.

He came to prefer them over the more popular Oreos, which he says copied Hydrox four years after the original first appeared in 1908.

“Oreos,” Kassoff said, “is a knock-off.”

Then, Hydrox was gone. It disappeared from store shelves in 2003, then came back for a brief 100th-anniversary run in 2008 before vanishing forever.

Well, not forever.

The 46-year-old Newport Coast entrepreneur is bringing back Hydrox. He acquired the product’s lapsed trademark last year and is in the process of testing the recipe.

“It’s definitely a go,” said Jim Morris, baking sales director for the Los Angeles County factory that’s preparing Kassoff’s first Hydrox run, which will be somewhere from 10,000 to 60,000 packages.

“If all goes well, in a couple months you’ll start to see Hydrox back on the shelf,” Morris said.

Hydrox is just the latest in a series of discontinued brands that Kassoff is attempting to resurrect.

Four years ago, Kassoff reintroduced Astro Pops, the rainbow-colored, rocket-shaped suckers billed as the longest-lasting lollipop on Earth. This year, he reintroduced Tart n Tinys, which are sour, cylindrical candy pellets.

He’s working to bring back other snacks and candies as well, along with some new inventions.

To get the rights, he applies to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to take over abandoned trademarks for lapsed brands.

Kassoff vs. Goliath

Kassoff’s most audacious venture has landed him in hot water with Macy’s, the nation’s dominant department store chain, which posted $28.1 billion in annual sales last year.

Since 2010, Kassoff has filed applications to take over the trademarks of 21 discontinued department stores rebranded since 1995 as Macy’s.

Among them: Robinson’s, May Co., Bullock’s, The Broadway, Joseph Magnin, Marshall Field’s, Abraham & Straus, and Filene’s.

Kassoff plans to launch online stores under some of these names, eventually opening brick-and-mortar versions to tap into the nostalgia of baby boomers for the regional stores where they shopped as kids.

The old stores harken back to a time when consumers could find high quality, personal service that’s lacking today, Kassoff and many of his supporters say.

Macy’s sued Kassoff, asserting in a recent court filing that he “simply hijacked the brand names” in an attempt to “usurp Macy’s valuable goodwill and brand equity.”

Kassoff countersued, saying Macy’s had abandoned those brands when it changed the store names.

Under federal law, a brand is considered abandoned if a business doesn’t make “bona fide” use of it for three years. After that, it’s up for grabs.

“That’s what’s worrying Macy’s,” Kassoff said. “They know they screwed up.”

Sweet tooth

Kassoff’s nostalgia for old brands began with his sweet tooth, which he’s had since birth.

He had relatives in the candy business. His father would say, ‘One piece of candy a day.’ But Kassoff and his sister always found where he hid the candy.

Astro Pops was Kassoff’s candy of choice. Rocket scientists invented the conical, fruit-flavored sucker in 1963.

But by 2004, Kassoff could no longer find them. They’d been discontinued, the machines that made them sold for scrap, he recalled.

“I couldn’t let the brand die,” Kassoff said. “It’s kind of like somebody stops making your favorite product. Like saying, ‘We’re going to stop making Coke.’ So I threw it out: ‘Would you sell the rights?’”

Kassoff bought the rights, dug up the Astro Pops formula, and re-engineered the machines used to make them. Eventually, he found a plant in China to produce them.

He even pioneered a brand of Astro Pops sodas. Now, Kassoff says, he’s selling 1.3 million Astro Pops a year.

Old fashioned candy stores like San Francisco-based Powell’s Sweet Shoppe snapped them up and reported solid sales.

“That went over extremely well with our stores,” said Powell’s owner, Bear Silber. “They’re like an old-timey candy store, and (Astro Pops) fit in with that perfectly.”

For Kassoff, who had been running his own executive recruiting firm, Astro Pops was only a hobby at first.

Soon, however, he decided to quit working as a head-hunter and go into the brand revival business full time.

He now holds trademarks for products like Bonkers, Wacky Wafers and Screaming Yellow Zonkers.

Kassoff teamed with candy maker David Klein, inventor of Jelly Belly jelly beans, which were made famous by President Ronald Reagan, who always kept a jar of them on his desk.

The story of how Klein lost the Jelly Belly business – before the brand’s rise to fame in the Reagan era – is the subject of a 2010 documentary. Now, Klein and Kassoff are collaborating to produce David’s Signature “Beyond Goumet” Jelly Beans.

Kassoff is “a very, very fascinating man,” Klein said. “A true entrepreneur who’s willing to take a risk. … He has a tremendous love for things that should be around that no longer are around.”

‘Ghost brands’

Kassoff isn’t the only one reviving dead or “ghost brands.”

Local Mexican food blogger Christian Ziebarth is fighting Del Taco over the trademark for Naugles, a Mexican food chain that merged with Del Taco in 1988. Others are doing the same with a host of products across the country.

Kassoff complains that some companies are hoarding brands to stifle competition.

Brand expert Chiranjeev Kohli of Cal State Fullerton noted that tapping into brand loyalty gives a new business a running start.

“(Consumers) may not know if it’s the original. They may not care,” Kohli said. “It’s a huge nostalgia factor. People have fond memories.”

People will shop at a store because that’s where they went with their parents as kids, he said. “It’s almost a habit.”

Consumer clamor

In some cases, consumers are the ones clamoring for discontinued brands.

In September, Coca-Cola responded to consumer pressure to bring back the citrus-flavored Surge soda. There are online petitions to bring back the Hummer, John Frieda Beach Blonde products and a defunct model train.

In 1998, Kim Burton of Wichita, Kan., started an online fan site for Hydrox, and readers filled 70 pages with comments.

And a Chicago-based website seeks to revive the Marshall Field’s department store, one of the Macy’s trademarks Kassoff is seeking.

“Many people feel it had a different quality of merchandise,” said James McKay, an architecture instructor who co-founded the site. “There was a perception of quality in everything they did.”

Others have offered support for Kassoff’s fight.

“Every region had its own stores. … They all had unique offerings,” recalled former Foley’s Department Store employee Richard Hyde, 48, of Houston, who regularly shopped at The Broadway, May Co. and Bullocks while visiting Southern California relatives as a boy.

The old department stores sponsored theater and fine arts programs, Hyde said. Celebrities would come and sign autographs.

Many of the stores had their own product lines you couldn’t get anywhere else.

Now, “all malls have only Macy’s,” Hyde lamented. “It’s the same generic experience, the same merchandise.”

Tote bags and T-shirts

Kassoff says several investors have expressed interest in backing his plan.

He maintains that Macy’s so-called heritage brands are abandoned, since the company’s predecessor, Federated Department Stores, acquired outlets across the nation from 1995 to 2006 and consolidated them under the Macy’s name.

The department store chain is merely trying to keep him from becoming a competitor, he claimed.

A Macy’s attorney declined comment, saying the firm doesn’t discuss pending litigation. But in court filings, Macy’s adamantly denied Kassoff’s claims.

“Macy’s did not abandon any of the Heritage Brands,” the company argued in its trial brief, filed in November.

The company says it paid millions to acquire the “good will” that consumers bear toward those venerable department stores.

Kassoff “has no connection to the history of the Heritage Brands,” Macy’s asserted. “(His) claim to them is based principally on nothing more than the filing of … trademark applications.”

Macy’s says it actually is using the old department store brands, selling tote bags and T-shirts that bear their emblems. It claims that it began planning those sales in 2001.

Kassoff noted, however, that the online sales of those products didn’t start until August 2011 – after he submitted his first batch of trademark applications.

Kassoff and his lawyer, Pleasanton attorney Benjamin Ashurov, maintain that Macy’s isn’t making “bona fide” use of any of the trademarks he’s seeking.

“A phrase or logo needs to serve an identifying purpose in order to be considered a trademark,” Ashurov said in an email. “Macy’s use of these marks on T-shirts and totes looks to be more along the lines of ornamental use.”

The case had been set for trial in San Francisco on March 2, but it was postponed to address additional brand applications Kassoff has filed in the past two years.

The trial is expected to begin in early 2016.

Meanwhile, Kassoff will be going up against the world’s best-selling cookie when he launches Hydrox this spring. Oreo owner Mondelez International reported $2.5 billion in sales last year, with 40 billion Oreos manufactured worldwide – enough to circle the globe at least five times stacked back-to-back.

And Oreos now are kosher, too.

Still, Kassoff expects the new Hydrox to be his biggest brand, with large chains expressing interest in carrying them.

He likens his business to a recyling firm, resurrecting cast-off products.

“People gravitate to these old brands because of the memories,” he said. “I sell experiences.”

Contact the writer: 714-796-7734 or jcollins@ocregister.com