Healthiest Crackers: Are Crackers Healthy, and Which Ones to Buy?

Are crackers healthy?

It depends on the cracker far more than on the word. A cracker can be little more than a whole grain baked with oil and salt. The researchers who created NOVA, the food-processing scale used in nutrition research, put foods made by adding salt, sugar or oil to a whole food in group 3, processed foods (Monteiro et al., 2019). Triscuit Hint of Salt is one of those.

Most crackers on the shelf go further. The same researchers list sweet or savoury packaged snacks among typical ultra-processed foods, and name flavours, flavour enhancers, colours and emulsifiers, plus ingredients such as high-fructose corn syrup, as markers of group 4. Ritz has high-fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin and natural flavor on its label. Goldfish has autolyzed yeast extract, a flavor enhancer, and annatto for color.

Why it matters: a large umbrella review of the research found convincing evidence linking diets high in ultra-processed food with higher risks of type 2 diabetes and of death from heart disease (Lane et al., BMJ, 2024). Those studies are observational and look at whole diets, not at a handful of crackers. So crackers are not a health food, but swapping a flavored cracker for a plain whole grain one is an easy way to cut ultra-processed food from a snack you already eat.

The crackers we scored, from best to worst

Each card links to the full page with the label, the ingredients and how the score was worked out.

• 

  Triscuit Hint of Salt Crackers

  NOVA 3 · Photo: macrofactor, CC BY-SA 3.0

  67Good

• 

  Goldfish Cheddar Crackers

  NOVA 4 · Photo: municorn-calorie-counter-app, CC BY-SA 3.0

  21Bad

• 

  Ritz Original Crackers

  NOVA 4 · Photo: foodless, CC BY-SA 3.0

  18Bad

• Triscuit Hint of Salt, 67 out of 100. whole grain wheat, canola oil and sea salt. One 28 g serving has 120 calories, 3 g of fiber, 3 g of protein, no sugar, no saturated fat and 50 mg of sodium. Processed (NOVA 3), not ultra-processed. Its weak spot is that it is dry and calorie-dense, like every cracker.
• Goldfish Cheddar, 21 out of 100. made with real cheddar, but the base is enriched wheat flour and vegetable oil. One 30 g serving (55 pieces) has 140 calories, 3 g of protein, 1 g of fiber and 250 mg of sodium. Ultra-processed (NOVA 4) because of the autolyzed yeast extract and the annatto.
• Ritz Original, 18 out of 100. enriched flour, canola and palm oil, sugar, salt and high-fructose corn syrup. One 16 g serving (5 crackers) has 80 calories, 4.5 g of fat, 1 g of saturated fat, 1 g of sugar, 130 mg of sodium, 1 g of protein and no fiber. Ultra-processed (NOVA 4).

Watch the serving sizes. A Ritz serving is 16 g and a Goldfish serving is 30 g, so the per-serving numbers make Ritz look lighter than it is. Per 100 g, Ritz has 812 mg of sodium, Goldfish 833 mg and Triscuit Hint of Salt 179 mg.

How to pick the healthiest crackers

You do not need a brand list. Five checks on the back of the box sort most crackers.

• First ingredient. ingredients are listed by weight. Look for a whole grain (whole grain wheat, brown rice, oats) or seeds first. "Enriched flour" or "wheat flour" means refined white flour with some vitamins added back, which is what Ritz and Goldfish start with.
• Length of the list. the shortest labels are the least processed. Seed crackers such as Mary's Gone Crackers Original (brown rice, quinoa, flax and sesame seeds, tamari, sea salt) are another example of a short list. Flavors, yeast extract, colors, corn syrup and emulsifiers such as lecithin are the signs of an ultra-processed cracker.
• Sodium. the FDA Daily Value for sodium is 2,300 mg, and the FDA calls 5% of the Daily Value or less per serving low and 20% or more high. Compare crackers per 100 g as well, because serving sizes differ: around 180 mg per 100 g is low for a cracker, around 800 mg is typical of the salty ones.
• Fiber. a whole grain cracker usually has a few grams per serving. Triscuit Hint of Salt has 3 g per 28 g, Goldfish 1 g per 30 g, Ritz none. The fiber Daily Value is 28 g.
• Saturated fat and sugar. plain crackers should have little of either. Palm oil and sugar near the top of the list are a sign you are holding a snack cracker, not a plain one.

Why the scores are so far apart

The Truvi score (our method) is an opinion from the label. It blends three parts: how processed the food is, its nutritional quality (worked out the way Nutri-Score, the A to E grade used on packs in Europe, does it) and how easy it is to overeat.

• Processing. Triscuit Hint of Salt, at NOVA 3, gets 56 out of 100 here. Goldfish and Ritz, both NOVA 4 with five additives each on our reading of the label, get 30.
• Nutrition. Triscuit gets 98 (Nutri-Score A on our calculation) thanks to its fiber and low salt. Goldfish gets 69 (Nutri-Score D) and Ritz 63 (Nutri-Score E), mainly for salt, and for Ritz also saturated fat.
• Overeating. researchers who built a numeric definition of hyper-palatable foods used markers such as more than 25% of calories from fat together with at least 0.3% sodium by weight (Fazzino et al., 2019). Ritz (51% of calories from fat) and Goldfish (32%) meet that marker and get 2 out of 100 here. Triscuit gets 32: it meets none of the markers, but at 4.3 calories per gram it is still easy to eat a lot of.

So Triscuit and Ritz, which sit next to each other on the shelf and come from the same maker, end up 49 points apart.

Are crackers a healthy snack?

A plain whole grain cracker can be part of a good snack. On its own it is dry and calorie-dense, at 4.3 to 5 calories per gram for the crackers here, and it does not fill you up for long. Pairing it with something that has protein or water in it, such as tuna, cheese, hummus or vegetables, makes the snack more filling.

The flavored snack crackers are closer to chips. Ritz and Goldfish both meet the fat and salt marker for hyper-palatable food, which is part of why a serving rarely stays one serving.

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