What’s Wrong with Today’s Ritz Crackers?

Photo Courtesy of Wikicommons

Food News! 

Have you bought Ritz crackers recently?  Have you noticed anything STRANGE about them?

A guy on TikTok named Mr. Denny bit into a Ritz cracker, and thought it “tasted weird.”  So he put it through a test.  He turned on his sink faucet…ran the water, with pressure, over the cracker… and it just washed over it.

He thought the cracker should break under the water or at least become soggy or dissolve but it held its shape.  Here’s video.

Then, Mr. Denny decided he needed a CONTROL, as any good researcher would, so he held a piece of white bread under the faucet. It did get soggy and break up.

Many people in the comments agreed that Ritz crackers taste different now… they say they’re less buttery, flaky, and fluffy, and are flatter and harder.

One person said, “I didn’t know they had a water-resistant version.”  And someone else joked, “The good news is, you can shingle your roof with them.”

The company behind Ritz hasn’t commented.  Nabisco sold the brand to Mondelez International in 2012.

The website Tasting Table compared the ingredients list on new boxes versus ones from 2015, and found:  The new boxes have less sugar, and they switched out the hydrogenated cottonseed oil for canola oil.

That could be it, because “the most significant change is in the fats, particularly the loss of partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil.  Hydrogenated fats in baking add structure and produce a flakier end product.”

In 2023, the FDA “partially banned certain hydrogenated oils.” But it’s unclear if this affected Ritz crackers.  Some people say they’ve noticed the quality declining for a while now.

SOURCE: BroBible