Then, in the midst of the Depression, Nabisco’s bakers came up with something novel. For years they had been trying to develop buttery crackers like those of some of their competitors. The result, covered with a thin coating of coconut oil and sprinkled with salt, was a completely new kind of cracker. They called it Ritz, and it became America’s most popular cracker almost overnight. Within a year, Nabisco had baked 5 million of them. Within three years, it was baking 29 million of them a day, and Ritz became the bestselling cracker in the world.
