Homekist crackers – which may be a Walmart housebrand as I have never found them anywhere else – are about half the price of even the cheapest of other saltines. You might be thinking “you get what you pay for” and… you’d be half-right.
The odd thing about Homekist crackers is that they have almost no quality control. I don’t mean that they’re terrible. I mean they are terribly inconsistent. They may be the most inconsistent packaged food I’ve ever purchased.
A good batch is as good as any name brand saltine out there. Better than most. Really good. Crispy. Great.
A bad batch is just terrible. They come out of the packaging half-stale. They’re cracked and broken. Sometimes you will lose up to a fifth or so of them to being only suitable for soup because they’re so crushed.
And there is no way of knowing which kind of batch you are going to get. There are some batches that are in between, but they mostly gravitate towards the great and the terrible.
Speaking of Walmart crackers, their reduced fat “Thin Wheats” are better than Wheat Thins.
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10 Responses to Homekist Crackers Are Like A Box of Chocolates
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Quality differences may depend on the manufacturer. Walmart does not, of course, have its own cracker factory, instead it pays other companies to make them under its own brand name. Given Walmart’s enormous sale volume it might well contract with two or more manufacturers to make the house brand crackers.
Sometimes the divergence is in the same box, oddly enough. (It’s always consistent within single packages, though.)
They should have their own cracker factory and have Kirk Van Houten run it.
He is the most famous alumnus of Gudger College.
I thought “Sam’s Choice” was wal-mart’s house brand. Or the weird blue-box generic stuff that seems to have started showing up and which makes me twitch ever so slightly because I associate plain-box generics with the bad economic days of the 1970s.
Also, I’ve found that the local wal-mart doesn’t seem to exercise a lot of care in how they keep, move, or manage stock – I’ve seen yogurt that was weeks out of date in the case, gotten cookies that were all broken in the box.
They seem to have multiple house brands, and/or exclusive agreements. I’ve commented on the World Table salsa before, which is another Walmart-only brand that is distinct from Sam’s Choice or Great Value.
Aldi’s housebrands all have different names, so if you aren’t paying attention, you would never know.
Aldis always seems like an odd alternate universe to me, where the brands are plausible but not-quite-like national brands.
I admit I find Aldis – at least the ones I’ve been in – unsettling because they have a cattle-chute quality to them, there’s only one direction you’re supposed to go through the store.
@fillyjonk
German efficiency
I do like Aldi’s instant coffee. To me, it some of the better tasting coffee I’ve had, and the price is right: I spend about $12 on three cans, and I’m set for the next few months. And their olive oil. It might not be the best ever, but it’s cheap.
Heh. I once described Aldi to a friend who had never been in one as “It used to be a West German chain, but the ones I’ve been in have a distinctly East German feel.” Well, other than being in a queue for a couple hours for a loaf of bread….