I'm guessing Rice Oriental was discontinued due to low sales. Most of that can probably be credited to the various stores selling it. For years I've been buying all of it that I could find. Why? Because it might be months before the store restocked it. Since they were able to restock it, it must not have been discontinued yet. Either BC kept running short or the situations below happened.
I've worked in the grocery business long enough to know that some items remain out of stock because the computer shows there is still a minimum amount of a product still in stock. There are many ways this can happen. The warehouse sends the wrong product, making the store computer think it has much more than it does. Some new stocker ruins most or all of a case of boxed product by cutting too deep with a boxcutter. A case of something gets smashed or speared by a forklift at the store. A wet product leaks all over some dry products.
With something like Hamburger Helper, that has a bunch of flavors. The empty spot gets filled in with another flavor to make the shelves look good. The person who's supposed to check for errors in the computer's stock, can easily miss one flavor out of several flavors. Between the Betty Crocker & store brand flavors you can see a wall of these boxes 6 foot tall and 4-10 feet wide. The Rice Oriental spot was usually ONE box wide while the others were 2 or 3 boxes wide, because the boxes were so thick they took up twice the space of Rice Oriental or like the cheeze flavors were kid's favorites.
It probably was not as fast a seller as Cheeseburger Macaroni. Most major stores have computers order their groceries, based on what is scanned through the register. A store might have things programed so 5 cases of Cheesburger Macaroni are kept in stock while only being programed to keep 1 case Rice Oriental. So if you buy Rice Oriental and other flavors of Hamburger Helper at the same time, all it takes it for the cashier to see that you have 10 boxes of Hamburger Helper, grab the 1st one or thier favorite flavor and scan all ten of them as the same flavor. So if you bought 8 boxes of Rice Oriental and they were all scanned as another flavor, the computer thinks there is still 8 boxes of Rice Oriental in stock. 7 boxes might be the trigger to reorder, but the computer thinks there are at lease 8 boxes left.
To top it all off, because you can't buy those imaginary boxes, the computer flags the item as a slow seller, wasting space.