Stand in the cracker aisle in your grocery store, and it's easy to become overwhelmed
by the hundreds of options.
What should you choose?
From worst to first, here's our rundown of which snack crackers you should reach for,
and what to avoid at all costs.
When you feel the snacktime itch start crawling around the deepest corners of your lizard
brain, do you often wish you could reach for small, cracker-sized portions of paper-coated
drywall?
If so, Wasa Crisp Bread is here to answer your prayers.
While calling this product "bread" is an insult to freshly-baked loaves, bakers, and bakeries
everywhere, this dense cracker sports a spectacular, shattering crunch that also manages to be
completely flavorless.
Sure, you could argue that it makes it easier to taste whatever you decide to top it with
to try to make it even the slightest bit satisfying, but there's still a problem.
Each bite swells and fills your mouth to the choking point, making an accompanying beverage
— or anything that can wash the taste of Wasa Crisp Bread out of your mouth — a must.
With the entire landscape of interesting, flavorful snack cracker options spread out
before you, why, oh why, would you reach for a box of Keebler Club Original crackers after
the age of seven?
Maybe only if you're looking for a bit of nostalgia with your snacking and fine, we'll
give you that.
While the crackers earn high marks for their weird butter flavor and even more unexpected
saltiness, the too-light, crispy texture makes for an insubstantial, unsatisfying cracker
that's just going to leave you hangry.
Sure, you can top them with a few slices of sharp cheddar cheese or some sliced salami
and ratchet up their desirability, but then again, you could just eat the cheese and meat
by itself and skip these dumb crackers altogether.
This is one of the few entries in our ranking that comes from the "sweet" category, if you
can even call graham crackers sweet.
Their genre-busting indecisiveness is what earns low marks for graham crackers; they're
certainly not a savory snack, but they also aren't something we'd reach for when our sweet
tooth needed massaging.
Graham crackers are weirdly gritty, taste a little bit like the cloud of dust you get
when you clap two chalkboard erasers together, and they're not good for anything but covering
in chocolate and burnt marshmallows.
Graham crackers, you're fine, but you're never going to be our go-to snack.
They're just weird.
But, when you know they were invented by a 19th century reverend who thought a bland
but healthy diet was the key to stopping mankind's moral collapse into anarchy and ending all
impure thoughts and immoral urges, well, graham crackers suddenly make a whole lot of sense.
Think about it for a minute, and you'll probably realize that the last time you voluntarily
ate any kind of saltine was during a bout with the stomach flu, after you spent the
day half-asleep on the couch watching The Price is Right while your mom brought you
Pedialyte popsicles and you prayed for a swift death.
No one eats them on purpose; in fact, they're at their best when they're used as either
an ingredient for something else or a vehicle for transporting other, better, messier foods
from your plate to your mouth.
The slogan for every brand of saltines should just be, "Yeah, here are Saltines, I guess"
because that's the only time anyone ever eats them: When they're there and we're already
sick.
"Does anyone need water or saltines?"
"I would feel safer with some saltines."
The greatest trick the Annie's corporation ever pulled off was taking products that already
exist, like boxed macaroni and cheese or Goldfish crackers, repackaging them in hip-looking
boxes touting their organic ingredients, and convincing moms the world over that they were
somehow feeding their kids a healthier alternative to the junk they themselves were raised on.
Sure, Annie's Cheddar Bunnies may not have any artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives,
but in removing those elements, Annie's has also removed flavor from their snack crackers.
They're grainy, dusty, chalky, and would taste much better with a heaping scoop of MSG and
some good old fashioned artificial cheddar flavor.
How do you eat Ritz Bits, those shrinkified buttery Ritz crackers spread with gritty fake
goo and pressed into adorable little sandwiches?
Do you nibble on them one at a time with pinky firmly extended, taking demure little bites?
Or do you crack open a single-serve package, open your mouth as wide as it will go, and
see if you can manage to shoehorn the entire bag into your mouth in one shot?
This is important, and will dramatically affect your enjoyment of Ritz Bits crackers.
However, we're not going to tell you which technique is the correct one.
Fun fact: No one has ever bought a package of Ritz Crackers on purpose.
They've sort of just always been there, in the forgotten back reaches of your pantry,
waiting for the moment when your house is suddenly visited by a horde of hungry toddlers,
who will stuff their mouths full of the buttery crumbs and then laugh uproariously at an episode
of Paw Patrol, blowing a soggy spray of chewed up cracker all over the front of the high-definition
television that cost more than your car.
There's no room for Ritz Crackers in the lives of grownups, even though eating an entire
sleeve of them in one sitting is oddly satisfying and delivers a weird sense of accomplishment.
If you think you've done nothing with your day, eat a sleeve of Ritz Crackers.
Then you'll have done something: you'll have experienced regret.
When you moved out and got your own crummy studio basement apartment for the first time,
you probably bought a box of Toasteds to mark the occasion.
After all, you're an adult now; no more crappy kid's crackers for you, you budding sophisticate.
Toasteds are thinner and lighter than other mass market crackers, and come in an array
of totally-not-a-kid-anymore flavors like "Savory Onion" and "Whole Wheat."
Squint hard enough at the surface of a Toasted, and you'll probably be able to make out little
flecks of grain, which is how you can tell that these crackers are basically medicine.
Being a grown-up is occasionally overrated, and these crackers perfectly demonstrate just
how thin that line is.
If the gluten-free craze has done anything for us as a society, it's forced snack food
manufacturers to consider how to present familiar products in innovative new ways.
Blue Diamond Almond Nut Thins are made with nuts and rice, and contain no grain whatsoever,
which results in a product that's weirdly addictive, mainly because the whole time you
eat them, you think, "Do I like these?
Do I think these are crackers?
If my body didn't know how to process wheat gluten, would eating these make me feel less
mad about it?"
Only you can decide, and only these crackers will bring a heaping helping of existential
questions to the plate with them.
Wheat Thins probably seem like they're arriving a little bit high on this list, don't they?
But have you actually had a Wheat Thin lately?
The long-forgotten snack food of '80s-era moms everywhere, particularly the ones who
spent all of their spare time working out to aerobics VHS tapes and wearing white Reeboks
with smart gray flannel pants suits, Wheat Thins are often overlooked in favor of flashier,
more intensely-flavored crackers.
But that's just not fair.
We love how little and thin they are, with just a slight slick of grease and that unmistakable
flavor that's nutty and salty, with just the faintest hint of sweetness poking through
all of that whole grain goodness.
Yep.
We said it.
Whether you mainline them straight from the paper bag, or pack them in tiny plastic Ziplocks
for on-the-go playground snacking, Goldfish crackers always satisfy.
And while they're available in a variety of sizes and flavors, it's the Cheddar variety
that keeps us coming back, handful after handful.
After handful.
They're perfectly light, airy, and crunchy, with flavor that never overpowers and that
won't cause palate fatigue, even after eating a whole bag.
Goldfish has even managed to convince us that eating a pile of their smiling crackers is
somehow more virtuous and healthy than, say, a can of Pringles, which means that Goldfish
are essentially good for you.
Who are we to argue?
Crunchy pretzels are delicious, but they can be a tad overwhelming; all of that salt and
heft from the dough makes them satisfying but hard to eat more than just a few of.
Snack Factory has addressed this problem by boiling pretzels down to their most delicious
elements: The toasty outside, and the salt.
They've done away with the bulk of the pretzel middle, resulting in a crispy, crunchy, chiplike
product that's perfect for eating by itself or using as a vehicle for scooping up cheese
spreads and dips.
Better Cheddars get kind of a bad rap, often portrayed as just another pretender to the
Cheez-It cheese cracker throne that somehow falls short.
But we think Better Cheddars are more than just another Cheez-It competitor; it's a cracker
that stands all on its own.
Packing tons of cheddar cheese flavor into a slim, crunchy profile, Better Cheddars taste
like what would happen if you ran over a dump truck full of Cheez-Its with a steamroller,
saturated the crumbs with salty seawater, stamped the resulting mash into thin rounds,
and baked them until toasty and crispy which, now that we think about it, we're pretty sure
we saw on the Better Cheddars episode of How It's Made.
It also could have just been a delicious, delicious dream.
There are two products that share a texture unlike anything else on Earth: Shredded Wheat
cereal and Triscuit brand snack crackers.
And chances are, you probably feel pretty strongly about the texture of these crackers,
one way or the other.
In a food manufacturing process that makes the United States the envy of the world, wheat
is softened by water and steam and pushed through a shredder, until it piles up in little
haystacks of grain perfect for topping with a slice of cheese or a piece of pepperoni.
The finished product, those little salty area rugs of whole grain deliciousness, stand alone
in their category, and for that, we salute them.
"What… they don’t need toppings."
“Paul!”
“Dano.”
“Paul…”
Did you expect Lance Toast Chee, or for that matter any entry from the wide world of "nutritionally
void traffic-cone-orange cracker and peanut butter sandwiches," to land this high on the
list?
We didn't either, until we started to lay out the candidates, and evaluate each cracker
using a highly-scientific bracket system.
But the results are in, and nine times out of 10, we'll reach for an inexpensive package
of these junk crackers before almost any other candidate.
They're crispy, they're salty, and they're dirt-cheap, making them an ideal snack for
a road trip or an overnight hike through the mountains.
Though let's face it: If you're the kind of person who hikes, you've probably never tasted
a Lance Toast Chee cracker sandwich, and honestly?
You're the one who's missing out.
They're not the first cheese-flavored cracker to enter our ranking, but if you expected
any other snack cracker to top the list, you're just not taking your cracker game seriously
enough.
Cheez-Its tick every box in the satisfying snacking to-do list: They're topped with big,
coarse granules of salt, packed with tons of perfectly balanced real and artificial
sharp cheddar cheese flavor, and can be eaten by the heaping fistful.
Members of our staff have been known to mow through an entire box in one sitting in a
semiconscious fugue state, as the power of the Cheez-It takes over our sensibilities
and sense of propriety and encourages us to eat more and more, until our stomachs are
stretched taut with a mash of partially-digested orange cracker goo.
"Body by Cheez-It!"
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