Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast, where I help you drift off one fact at a time. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster, and today's episode is about Cheez-It Crackers. Cheez-It is a brand of cheese crackers manufactured by Kelanova through its Sunshine Biscuits division.
Approximately 26 by 24 millimeters, the Square Crackers are made with wheat flour, vegetable oil, cheese, skim milk, salt, and spices. The history of Cheez-It Crackers began in 1907, when Weston Green founded the Green and Green Company in Dayton, Ohio.
Green's company produced a variety of baked snack foods, such as Dayton crackers, graham crackers, ginger snaps, and during World War I, hardtack. On March 31, 1921, Green introduced Cheez-It crackers, commonly called Cheez-Its, as a new product. The company marketed the cracker as a baked rarebit, a reference to a dish of melted cheese over toast.
On May 23, 1921, the first Cheez-It logo was submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In the early 1930s, the Kansas City-based Sunshine Biscuits, which was known as the Loose Wiles Biscuit Company until 1947, acquired the Green and Green Company, and with it came the Cheez-It Cracker.
Sunshine Biscuits expanded the distribution and popularity of Cheez-It Crackers across the country. In 1996, Keebler acquired Sunshine Biscuits, and in 2001, Kellogg's acquired Keebler, bringing Cheez-It crackers under its umbrella. In late 2023, Kellogg's spun off its North American cereal division as W.K. Kellogg Company.
The company's snack food business, including Cheez-It, became part of the renamed Kelanova. On August 14, 2024, Kelanova announced Mars Inc. has entered into an agreement to acquire the Kelanova brand. The deal is anticipated to close early in 2025. Cheez-Its were officially launched in Canada in January 2020, as well as Australia in April 2024.
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Chapter 2: What is the history of Cheez-It crackers?
Snack Mix Sriracha. Snack Mix Sweet and Salty. Snapped Barbecue. Snapped Jalapeno Jack. Snapped Parmesan Ranch. Twists Buffalo Blue. Wendy's Baconator, limited time offering. Zing's Chipotle Cheddar. Zing's Queso Fundido. That concludes the article on Cheez-Its. Now let's look into the history of hardtack. Hardtack is a type of dense cracker made from flour, water, and sometimes salt.
It is very inexpensive and long-lasting, allowing it to be used for sustenance in the absence of perishable foods. It is commonly used during long sea voyages, land migrations and military campaigns. Along with salt pork and corned beef, hardtack was a standard ration for many militaries and navies from the 17th to the early 20th centuries.
The name is derived from tack, the British sailor slang for food. The earliest use of the term recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1830. It is known by other names including Brewis, possibly a cognate from bros, cabin bread, pilot bread, sea biscuit, soda crackers, sea bread as rations for sailors, ship's biscuit, and pejoratively as dog biscuits.
Muller Breakers, Sheet Iron, Tooth Stullers, Ponser Platten, Armor Plates, Germany, and Worm Castles. Australian and New Zealand military personnel knew them with some sarcasm as Anzac Wafers, not to be confused with Anzac Biscuit. The introduction of the baking of processed cereals, including the creation of flour, provided a more reliable source of food.
Egyptian sailors carried a flat brittle loaf of millet bread called dora cake.
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Chapter 3: What are the main ingredients in Cheez-It crackers?
A cracker called buccalatum is known from ancient Rome. King Richard I of England left for the Third Crusade with biscuit of muslin, which was a mixed grain compound of barley, bean flour and rye. The more refined captain's biscuit was made with finer flour. Some 5th century BCE physicians, such as Hippocrates, associated most medical problems with digestion.
For sustenance and health, eating a biscuit daily was considered good for one's constitution. Because hardtack biscuits were baked hard, they would stay intact for years if kept dry. For long voyages hardtack was baked four times, rather than the more common two, and prepared six months before sailing.
Because it is dry and hard, hardtack, when properly stored and transported, will survive rough handling and temperature extremes. Dry hardtack is dense and virtually inedible. Troops issued it usually made it edible by dampening or crushing the biscuits. When James VI and I set sail for Norway in October 1589, his provisions included 15,000 biscuit bakes.
In 1665, Samuel Pepe's first regularized naval victualing in the Royal Navy, with varied and nutritious rations, to include one pound daily of good, clean, sweet, sound, well-baked, and well-conditioned wheaten biscuit. By at least 1731 it was officially codified in naval regulation that each sailor was rationed one pound of biscuit per day.
Hardtack, crumbled or pounded fine and used as a thickener, was a key ingredient in New England's seafood chowders from the late 1700s. In 1801, Josiah Bent began a baking operation in Milton, Massachusetts, selling watercrackers made of flour and water that would be resistant to deterioration during long sea voyages from the Port of Boston.
These were also used extensively as a source of food by the gold prospectors who migrated to the gold mines of California in 1849. Since the journey took months, hardtack was stored in the wagon trains. Bent's company later sold the original hardtack crackers used by troops during the American Civil War. The G.H.
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Chapter 4: How did Cheez-It become a popular snack in America?
Bent Company operated in Milton and sold these items to Civil War reenactors and others until 2018. By 1818, the United States Navy had outlined that each sailor was to be given 14 ounces of bread per day as part of their daily ration, while serving on board in the form of hardtack.
The procurement of these stores was the responsibility of the ship's purser, and was not strictly outlined by the Board of Navy Commissioners. During the American Civil War, three-by-three-inch hardtack was shipped from Union and Confederate storehouses.
Civil War soldiers generally found their rations to be unappealing and joked about the poor quality of the hardtack in a satirical song, Hardtack Come Again No More. The song was sung to the tune of the Stephen Foster song, Hard Times Come Again No More, and featured lyrics describing the hardtack rations as being old and very wormy and causing many stomachs sore.
John Billings, the soldier in the 10th Massachusetts Battery, outlines many details on how hardtack was utilized during the war in his book, Hardtack and Coffee. With insect infestation common in improperly stored provisions, soldiers would break up the hardtack and drop it into their morning coffee.
This would not only soften the hardtack, but the insects, mostly weevil larvae, would float to the top, and the soldiers could skim them off and eat the biscuits. The grubs left no distinctive flavor behind, Some men turned hardtack into a mush by breaking it up with blows from their rifle butts, then adding water. If the men had a frying pan, they could cook the mush into a lumpy pancake.
Otherwise, they'd drop the mush directly on the coals of their campfire. They also mixed hardtack with brown sugar, hot water, and sometimes whiskey to create what they called a pudding to serve as dessert.
Royal Navy hardtack during Queen Victoria's reign was made by machine at the Royal Clarence Victualing Yard at Gosport, Hampshire, stamped with the Queen's mark and the number of the oven in which it was baked.
When machinery was introduced into the process, the dough was thoroughly mixed and rolled into sheets about two yards long and one yard wide, which were then stamped in one stroke into about 60 hexagonal shaped biscuits. The hexagonal shape saved material and time and made them easier to pack compared to the traditional circular shaped biscuit.
Hardtack remained an important part of the Royal Navy sailors' diet until the introduction of canned foods. Canned meat was first marketed in 1814, and preserved beef in tins was officially introduced to the Royal Navy rations in 1847.
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Chapter 5: How did the acquisition of Cheez-It affect its production?
Soda crackers normally do not contain added sugar and the fat or shortening level is quite low. Another type of cracker uses no leavening. Examples are matzah, water crackers, also known as water biscuits, and triscuits. Crackers come in many shapes and sizes, such as round, rectangular, triangular, or irregular. Crackers sometimes have cheese or spices as ingredients, or even chicken stock.
Saltines and oyster crackers are often used in or served with soup. Cheese crackers are prepared using cheese as a main ingredient. Commercial examples include Cheez-It, Cheese Nips, and Goldfish. Graham crackers and digestive biscuits are treated more like cookies than crackers. Although they were both invented for their supposed health benefits, modern versions of both are sweet.
Similarly, animal crackers are crackers in name only. Animal crackers and graham crackers may have docking holes. Cracker brands include Bremner Wafers, Captain's Wafers, Cheese Nips, Club Crackers, Goldfish Crackers, In-A-Biscuit, Jacobs, Ritz Crackers, Townhouse Crackers, Triscuit, TUC, and Wheat Thins.