Nabisco Air Crisps
Ritz, Wheat Thins and Cheese Nips puffed full of air pockets into something between a chip and a cracker, Nabisco's 1995 answer to the low-fat decade. A box of them vanished in one sitting and left you unsure what you had just eaten. They were gone from shelves by the early 2000s.
Nabisco introduced Air Crisps in 1995, a new light-and-crunchy snack advertised as delicate crisps with air pockets, in the shapes and flavors of its existing crackers: Ritz, Cheese Nips and Wheat Thins, plus potato and tortilla nacho versions. The company called them "crispy baked snacks," which was the point in a decade when "baked" was the magic word on a snack box. By January 1996 the Ritz and Cheese Nips versions were in grocery stores at $1.99 for a 7-ounce box.
The Deseret News ran a panel taste test that month, and the verdicts capture the whole product. The Ritz version was "thinner than regular Ritz, but very crisp." One tester, Nihla Lake, said it "couldn't decide if it wanted to be a chip or a cracker," with "the best of both - crispy, light and airy - but maybe a little too fragile." The cheese version came out "crispy, cheesy, light and thin." Most of the panel simply liked them; the puzzle of what exactly they were never went away. In March 1998 the paper tried the new Potato Air Crisps, in regular and barbecue at $2.29 for a 7¾-ounce box, and got the same split: "potato chips in disguise" and "a crisp cracker-like potato chip" from the fans, and "some weird, scientifically engineered hybrid" from the one holdout who found something insubstantial about the whole idea.
The line was big enough that a 1999 UPI story on Nabisco's restructuring listed Air Crisps alongside Ritz, Cheese Nips, Grahams and Chewy Chips Ahoy! as products of the Houston bakery the company was closing that November. After that the trail goes quiet. The Daily Meal's retrospective puts the last shelf appearance around 2003 and notes that some customers were dismayed enough to write to their local newspapers asking where the crisps had gone, which is as close to a formal ending as the product ever got.
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