What Happened To Ritz Crackers? Why Customers Suspect The Brand Made Big Changes

If you think some of your favorite brands don't taste the way they used to, you're not alone. In the last few years, many iconic brands have changed their recipes, often without making any public announcements, leaving customers wondering what happened and posting their woes on social media. Ritz Crackers is the latest product to leave fans disappointed due to a suspected change.

Online complaints from the last couple of years focus on Ritz Crackers no longer having the same taste or texture as they used to. The crackers have been called bland, with blame placed on changes to the recipe to reduce both salt and sugar, as well as changing the oils used. Ritz crackers were previously known for their flaky, buttery texture and a good balance of salty sweetness that many feel is now missing. One Redditor said, "The last couple boxes of Ritz I have got have been different. They took something out! Whatever makes that buttery flaky texture and taste."

In 2024, Mondelez, the company that owns Ritz, acknowledged that the size of the package had shrunk by 30%, though the price remained unchanged. The company blamed this on "significantly higher input costs," per the BBC. But Mondelez did not mention any recipe changes at that time.

In 2026, aside from unbleached enriched flour, Ritz crackers' ingredients include soybean and/or canola oil, palm oil, sugar, and salt. A 2015 ingredients list shows soybean oil, sugar, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and salt. Sugar featured more prominently in the older ingredient list, which likely sweetened the overall flavor. The most significant change is in the fats, particularly the loss of partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Hydrogenated fats in baking add structure and produce a flakier end product.

Shortening, or hydrogenated oil, is vegetable oil that is processed with hydrogen to become solid at room temperature. You can substitute shortening for oil in many recipes. The appeal of shortening comes from how closely it mimics butter. Ritz Crackers were never made with butter, but hydrogenated oil was the secret to the crackers' buttery texture. With shortening out of the ingredients, the texture changes people have noticed make sense.

Trans fats were banned by the FDA in 2018, and partially hydrogenated fats were a major source of them. Palm oil, itself a controversial ingredient, is used as a replacement for the hydrogenated oil, but it's not an exact substitute. There are plenty of people online saying that palm oil is ruining the taste of foods, with a Redditor saying, "I've stopped buying many products because they are no longer the delicious food they used to be." The reason they give: palm oil.

Complaints about Ritz's texture include that the crackers are too dry. One Facebook comment says, "They fall apart if you try to spread anything on them." On Reddit, another criticism is, "They tasted off to me, much less salty/buttery." Without knowing the exact recipe, there's no way to confirm if salt has been scaled back significantly, but enough people comment on it to think there may be something to it.

Many complaints about Ritz Crackers on Reddit date from 2025, but some appear as early as 2023, with blog posts about texture problems going back to 2021. It is hard to say whether current complaints stem from further recipe changes or from people noticing differences over time. Whatever the case, Ritz's recipe is definitely different now from a decade ago, and most people don't think it changed for the better.