The Battle of the Ages: Cheese Nips vs. Cheez-It

I have several post ideas backing up in the queue, so here’s a frivolous post for Sunday, a day that I normally use to take a blogging break.

Back when I was a kid in the 1960s, there was an iconic battle going on in the snack aisle of the local grocery store with “Cheese Nips” and “Cheez-It” cheese crackers vying head-to-head for the consumer’s dollar. Cheese Nips (introduced in 1955) was produced by cookie and cracker powerhouse, Nabisco, while Cheez-It (introduced in 1921) was made by also-ran, Sunshine Biscuits. I can remember my parents buying both brands, probably determined by which one had provided a coupon in the Sunday paper that week.

Fifty-years later, you can’t even find Cheese Nips at Wegman’s, where we do our grocery shopping here in Rochester, but the shelves are FULL of various flavors of Cheez-It. Cheez-It definitely won the battle in the grocery aisle, hands down.

Recently, I was walking through Tops, the other grocery chain in town, and noticed they still stocked Cheese Nips, although they only had a few boxes compared to their large offering of the various flavors of Cheez-It. For old times sake, I bought a box of Cheese Nips along with a box of regular Cheez-It and brought them home for a comparison taste test.

Cheese Nips boasts on its box that it “has real cheddar cheese” and that “original Cheez-It doesn’t” while Cheez-It lamely boasts that its “made with 100% real cheese.”

Okay, time for the taste test comparison.

[Drumroll]

Hmm. Both of these crackers are pretty good, but I have to say that Cheez-It seemed to have a more robust flavor than Cheese Nips. It definitely seemed to have a cheesier taste. It also seemed to have a crunchier texture, as if it had been baked a tad longer than Cheese Nips. The winner in this contest is Cheez-It, although not by a huge margin. I imagine some would have difficulty distinguishing the difference.

Kudos to Sunshine (bought by Keebler in 1996 and by Kellogg in 2000) for winning the cheese cracker contest by turning Cheez-It into a snack dynamo. However, turnabout is fair play. Over the decades, Nabisco thoroughly trounced Sunshine’s original chocolate wafer and cream cookie, Hydrox (introduced in 1908), with its own version, the vaunted Oreo (introduced in 1912). Sunshine/Kellogg eventually gave up on Hydrox altogether. As a kid, I thought the name, “Hydrox,” was very off-putting/unappealing, sounding more like a science experiment than a snack cookie. A very strange brand-name choice by today’s standards, but I know that the marketers of that era were trying to link science to everything!