The RITZ X OREO Collab Answers the Question, "What If?"

When salty meets sweet, magic happens. I’m thinking of things like salted caramel or even salt on top of a warm chocolate chip cookie. Naturally, when Ritz and Oreo announced a limited-edition collaboration at the end of May, a mashup of their two products that’s half Oreo and creme and half Ritz cracker and peanut butter, we jumped at the chance to order. The combination of a salty Ritz cracker with peanut butter and a sweet chocolatey Oreo sounded heavenly. After spending about two hours refreshing the Oreo website nonstop (they only made 1,000 boxes, so demand was high), I was finally able to order a pack of this fascinating cookie-cracker hybrid for the office.

RITZ X OREO: I was banking on the salt to make this product great, but it simply isn’t there. Sure the Ritz cracker half has a whisper of salt on it, but there seemed to be very little salt in the peanut butter, so any savory flavor I perceived was swiftly overpowered by the sweetness of both the Oreo cookie and the creme. Taste aside, the mashup probably wouldn’t work in wide release. The Ritz crackers can’t take as much of a beating as the sturdy Oreo cookies, so the package came with many of the crackers chipped and in bad shape. The worst part was that the Oreo half seemed a little stale, perhaps from moisture it absorbed from its cracker counterpart. I love both Ritz and Oreos, and I wanted to love this mini-launch so badly! But maybe some questions are better left unanswered—and some Frankenstein cookies better left unleashed.