At the Cary Heritage Museum, a compact municipal history exhibit on the third floor of a cultural center in downtown Cary, North Carolina, the going joke is that the package of peanut butter crackers on display has never changed.
Mounted between images of the atomic bomb and Elvis Presley on the town’s timeline, the six-pack of Austin sandwich crackers looks as fresh as the day it was affixed to the wall. The cheese crackers haven’t crumbled; the peanut butter filling hasn’t grown mold.
But out in the real world, longtime fans of the alternative Nab say their favorite snack is anything but the same. The official homepage for the product, which now belongs to food conglomerate Kellanova, is clogged with comments from buyers distressed about the scanty amount of peanut butter in their cracker sandwiches. In the 40 most recent comments posted, the phrase “no peanut butter” occurred 29 times.
As one dejected customer wrote in a one-star review accompanied by an image of two nude cheese crackers, “I bought these in the hopes of there being actual peanut butter in the peanut butter crackers I purchased.”
Kellanova responded to her complaint with a terse apology—“Marie, we’re sorry to learn that your crackers had no peanut butter”—and a case number, but company representatives didn’t acknowledge multiple requests for comment by The Food Section. And since Kellanova hasn’t publicly disclosed its peanut butter standard, it’s impossible to fully gauge the legitimacy of buyers’ gripes. But an independent investigation shows nearly half of Austin Cheese Crackers with Peanut Butter have what most North Carolinians would consider inadequate filling.
In other words, Cary’s first major manufacturer may have gotten mixed up with the contemporary scourge of shrinkflation, or charging the same price for what consumers may not realize is less—at least until they discover their bag of trail mix is mostly raisins, or their cracker sandwich is empty.
“Shrinkflation is kind of sneaky, and that’s why people are so upset,” said Connel Fullenkamp, a Duke University professor of the practice of economics.
America’s version of palace intrigue might well involve the cracker industry, which has been making deals and arranging mergers since the turn of the twentieth century. What’s critical to know in this context is the National Biscuit Company in 1924 released snack packets of square cheese cracker sandwiches filled with peanut butter. Nabisco soon thereafter rechristened its product, popular with wage workers and sportsmen, as NAB.
By then, the Charlotte-based Lance Packaging Company was already making peanut butter. But it didn’t bake crackers until 1938, when it introduced its ToastChee, which is what the world now knows as Nabs.
Cooper E. Taylor took credit for that marketing triumph. The son of a Kentucky farmer who originally hoped to enroll at West Point, Taylor joined Lance in 1924, when his father’s death forced him to find a paying job. He rose to the rank of vice president and was considered such an authority on cracker sales that he was named to the federal Office of Price Administration’s advisory committee on the biscuit and cracker industry in 1943.
Taylor and his wife were fixtures of Charlotte society, entertaining regularly at their estate on Providence Road. But those parties ended when the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce, looking toward a future without tobacco fortunes, lured Cooper to Wake County. In 1947, he launched the Taylor Food Company, a peanut product manufactory.
In the first six months, he lost $140,000.
“It was hard because I was going up against my own marketing strategy,” he told The News and Observer in 1983, referring to Lance’s domination.
He tried promotional schemes, such as giving out bags of peanuts on Capital Airlines. He tried recruiting hyperaggressive salesmen, and, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. Middle District Court in 1957, he tried withholding salaries. Still, the company’s turning point may have come when he replaced the 60 women who hand wrapped Taylor cracker sandwiches in cellophane with four machines.
By 1967, Taylor Food Company was doing well enough to serve steaks at its twentieth anniversary party. The following year, Omaha’s Fairmont Food Company—which had previously purchased Austin Biscuit Company of Baltimore—bought the whole operation.
Even under new ownership and with a new name, Cary’s cracker sandwiches were considered superior to ToastChee by ardent devotees who swore their cheddar character was sharper. Still, the taste of cheese can’t make up for missing peanut butter on the palates of eaters who prefer those flavors together.
But are Austin Peanut Butter on Cheese Cracker Sandwiches in fact short on peanut butter these days? To find out, The Food Section went to Walmart, a leading outlet for the brand.
Of the 120 cracker sandwiches examined by The Food Section, only two had little apparent peanut butter. Another 53 cracker sandwiches had at least one perforation through which daylight was visible, suggesting a potentially insufficient smear.
In Kellanova’s defense, though, the value box of 20 cracker packs was priced at $6.84, which works out to a little more than a nickel a sandwich. To put that figure in perspective, when the then-Taylor Biscuit Company in 1967 was pushing parents to send cracker packs to their sons at college or in Vietnam, each sandwich was 3.6 cents.
If crackers had kept pace with inflation, Austin could charge 38 cents for a single orange-hued snack.
“I don’t want to convey too much sympathy for producers, but they want to maintain prices people can afford,” Connel, the Duke economist, said. “That’s a potential shrinkflation situation.”
According to Connel, when ingredient prices climb, which accurately describes peanut butter’s trajectory, producers can rewrite their recipes with synthetic substitutions. When they do, “they have to be really careful because they know small changes can change the taste of product.”
Alternatively, they can pass along the elevated cost to consumers, but those increases are hard to hide when a product is as cheap as sandwich crackers. A gourmet bakery patron might not kvetch about paying $43 instead of $41 for a peanut butter torte with chocolate ganache, but an Austin fan is unlikely to abide a 29 percent price hike on cracker sandwich value packs.
So, using a smaller quantity of certain ingredients seems like an optimal solution. The only problem is ratios are as critical to taste as ingredient quality. And in the case of Nabs, experts agree that ratio should tilt toward peanut butter.
“Proper Nabs are about the peanut butter, not the crackers,” ruled Sheri Castle, host of The Key Ingredient on PBS and lifelong Nabs connoisseur. “Nabs should smell and taste like peanut butter with a long finish. If one has to pry open a knockoff Nab to see what, if anything, is inside, it’s a dud: Nothing more than a couple of florescent orange saltines glued together by false advertising.”
Talk about seeing the light.
Hanna, you have done it again. I must have looked at this peanut butter piece three times before I actually opened it. I like peanut butter but not on fluorescent orange cheesy crackers. So when I finally started reading I had to devour every last word. I guess that’s why you keep winning those awards.
My bagel guy at our local farmer’s market , Josh Small of @doughco._ thanked me on Saturday for the subscription I gifted him. He loves it. Makes a great Father’s Day or Mother’s Day gift or anytime gift.
Thank you! I love the Father’s Day gift suggestion. I believe my dad is angling for a metal detector this year, but let’s see if we can’t get a few more fathers on board in June. Appreciate the kind words!