Origins of Fruit Snacks

The earliest written reference I can find is a first hand account of an Arabic explorer by the name of Ibn Batuta who had an entry on his travels to the city of Antaliya where he states:

”The town contains orchards and produces fine fruits, including an admirable kind of apricot, called by them Qamar ad-Din, which has a sweet almond in its kernel. This fruit is dried and exported to Eqypt, where it is regarded as a great luxury.”

• from Ibn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354. Translated and selected by H.A.R. Gibb. Edited by Sir E. Denison Ross and Eileen Power. (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company,)

And this humble beginning

The Birth of the Modern Fruit Snack

Aside from simply drying fruits the earliest references I can find that resembles the more processed fruit snacks we have today is something called amardeen.
Amardeen was made from apricot paste, which was handmade, pressed, and dried into a sheet to be sold by the pound. 

In 1953 a candy maker named Louis  Shalhoub invented the first fruit snacks. It was a fruit roll-up. He called it the Joray Fruit Rolls. The main reason for the invention of the first fruit snacks was for those people who want to go hiking and need to take a low weight but energizing snack with them.

Then a company took over and created the first fruit snack by a company. The company was General Mills and they created their first fruit snack in 1983.