Ritz Bits
Miniature Ritz crackers glued together with cheese or peanut butter, the snack pack that rattled in every lunchbox and starred in a run of outer-space commercials. Nabisco's bite-sized spin on a cracker from 1934.
The Ritz cracker itself dates to 1934, when Nabisco, which had acquired the Jackson Cracker Company and its similar Jaxon in 1919, introduced it against the Hi Ho cracker. Sydney Stern, a Nabisco commercial artist given a weekend to name and brand the new buttery cracker, found the circular logo on the label inside his hat and pitched the name as a Depression-era "bite of the good life." Nabisco was bought by R. J. Reynolds in 1985, forming RJR Nabisco, sold to Philip Morris in 2000 for about $19.2 billion, and folded into Mondelēz International when Kraft split in two in 2012.
Ritz Bits shrank the cracker to a coin. By April 1989 a Deseret News tasting panel was reviewing "Nabisco's newest Ritz," mini crackers "just larger than a nickle" in cheese and low-salt flavors, 11 ounces for $1.67, and asking whether "Ritz Bits are hits?" The version a 1990s kid remembers came next: Ritz Bits Sandwiches, two of the minis with a layer of cheese or peanut butter between them, sold in the red box and in snack-size bags. Nabisco's own 1996 annual filing lists Ritz Bits Sandwiches as an established line without dating it, and the earliest commercials collectors have posted online date the sandwich version to 1990, with a 1991 spot sending the crackers to a cheese-cratered "Cheez Planet" and the box billing them as made with real cheese.
The line has barely changed since. When Ritz Bits added Spicy Queso in December 2024 it was the first new flavor in nearly a decade.
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