Keebler CC Ricers
Keebler's 1993 rice chips with a rock-and-roll attitude, three flavors and a name riffing on "C.C. Rider." The elves handed them out in some 20,000 supermarkets as the partner snack in an Elfin Delights cookie promotion, and then they were gone within a few years, remembered mainly through the commercial.
CC Ricers arrived in 1993 from Keebler's salty-snack division in Elmhurst, Illinois, the group behind Tato Skins, O'Boisies and Pizzarias. They were a crispy rice-based chip, the "CC" reportedly standing for "crispy crunchy," sold by later accounts in zesty cheddar, sour cream and French onion, and original seasoned flavors, and the name was a play on "C.C. Rider," the old blues standard. The commercials leaned on that: the Keebler elves pitched the chips with a rock-band attitude, the kind of elf-fronted spot that is the only reason anyone remembers the product today. The same year Keebler also tried Chacho's, a flour-based tortilla chip.
Keebler pushed hard. Supermarket News reported in March 1994 that the company had just finished a two-month national demonstration program in roughly 20,000 supermarkets, most of them sampling CC Ricers alongside the new reduced-fat Elfin Delights cookies. "There were some stores that just had Elfin Delights and some that just had CC Ricers," brand manager Tim Maxwell said. "But the vast majority paired the two together, just for economies of scale." The push came with a temporary price cut, coupons and Keebler's usual end-aisle displays. It did not stick. In 1995 Keebler's British owner, United Biscuits, first planned to spin off the salty-snack chip business and then sold the whole company to Flowers Industries and a private-equity partner, and the chips faded without any announcement anyone has found; snack-history accounts put the end around 1996. The ad outlived the product by decades.
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