If there were a montage of grocery store aisles over the past thirty years, you’d see chips gradually pushing every other product to the suburbs, their dominance threatened only by crackers, precisely because they’re trying to be like chips.
Gaze along the cracker aisle horizon and you’ll find Ritz Toasted Chips, Pepperidge Farm Cracker Chips, and Wheat Thins Toasted Chips, among countless others. You’ll see chip flavors that have no business being in the cracker section: sour cream and onion, salt and vinegar, ranch, cheddar, salsa, barbeque, buffalo, and honey mustard.
Clearly, crackers are trying to dethrone chips, but what’s bothersome is that they still want to be thought of as crackers. Yet if they think they’re so delicious with all those flavors, why don’t they go compete in the chip aisle like a soldier? Because they wouldn’t last a day in the chip aisle. Sun Chips and Doritos would kill them.
Wheat Thins are a textbook example of the new cracker/chip pathology. They began their transformation with Hint of Salt and Garden Vegetable crackers, both minor, acceptable forays into flavor, in the sense that their tastes do not overwhelm the cheese placed upon them (more on this later). Then the flavored crackers were introduced, with chip flavors like Zesty Salsa, Chili Cheese, Honey Mustard, and Ranch. What cheese goes on Chili Cheese crackers? Manchego? Roquefort? Probably Pepper Jack.
With these bastardizations, Wheat Thins passed a point of no return, and so it was unsurprising when they completely shed their form as a cracker by creating Toasted Chips, a product which does not contain the word cracker anywhere on the package. We all gave Michael Jordan crap for trying to play baseball, but have mysteriously let Wheat Thins slide.
By its nature, a cracker’s purpose is to be a vehicle for something else, like cheese or a spread of some sort, and not the star of the show, like a chip. That’s why they’re flat. We do end up snacking on plain crackers occasionally, but only because we’re out of cheese and too lazy to buy some. It produces the same vague, miserable feeling you get when eating cereal without milk.
The introduction of chip flavors negates adding cheese, since you would never put a slice of cheese on a Zesty Salsa or cheddar-flavored cracker, at least not if you were raised properly. If a block of cheese arrived at home to find its cracker spouse wearing cheddar cheese flavoring, the cheese would cry, “Well, I guess I’m not needed here.”
And it wouldn’t be, because a chip-flavored cracker is a chip, and should move aisles to be with the rest of its kind. Call me old fashioned, but I like my crackers to taste like crackers.