Austin Crackers

Austin Quality Foods baked its way out of Cary, North Carolina, and its wrappers still carry the boast "Since 1932." By the 1990s it had quietly become one of the country's biggest names in single-serve baked snacks — cracker sandwiches under the Austin name, plus the Zoo animal crackers that rode along in a million lunchboxes. The company's specialty was the format, not the flourish: a sleeve of six identical sandwiches, built to survive a vending-machine drop and cost less than anything else behind the glass.

The icon was orange. Cheese crackers — that particular glowing, nowhere-in-nature orange — pressed around a thin layer of peanut butter. The dust got on your fingers, the peanut butter glued the whole apparatus to the roof of your mouth, and the sleeve crinkled loudly enough to announce you to an entire study hall. Lance's Toast Chee sat next to it in half the machines as the eternal rival, and partisans of each regarded the other with genuine suspicion, despite the two products being, to any neutral observer, nearly identical.

The 90s were the brand's independent twilight. In March 2000, Keebler bought Austin Quality Foods — then doing roughly $200 million a year in sales — for about $250 million, and just a year later Kellogg's swallowed Keebler whole, folding the orange six-packs into a snack portfolio the size of a small nation. The Austin name survived the digestion and still shows up on shelves today.

But the memory it owns is set firmly in that earlier decade: quarters into the machine after practice, the B4 coil turning, and that crinkly orange sleeve dropping into the tray — six little sandwiches that tasted like nothing else because they tasted exactly like themselves.