La Panzanella

[Fat Guy]

La Panzanella, a company out of Seattle, makes crackers called croccantini that sell for $4.99 for an 8-ounce package at the market I frequent in New York City. They're rectangular flatbread crackers, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4"x8" (I've never actually measured), and they are amazingly good -- by far the best crackers I've ever had. They're handmade, you can really taste the high quality of the wheat and other ingredients, and they have an airy, crackly texture and little internal layers of flakiness. I treat myself to a package once in awhile, and when I have them around I often choose them over fresh bread. They come in various flavored versions, though no extra flavor is necessary. I usually get plain ("original") or black pepper. These crackers are so good you can just sit and eat them without anything, but they're also great vehicles for cheese, butter, hummus, etc.

[Katie Meadow]

I'm only posting because your post was lonely, I saw it by accident, and I'm surprised no one else chimed in to sing the praises of these crackers. They are indeed fabulous. I don't buy any other crackers anymore. My favorite, and my staple is the Original. My next favorite is the Fennel--very subtle. Even the whole wheat was really good. I prefer them to baguette for any cheese that isn't super runny. I too love them for Middle Eastern or Greek type spreads like babaganoush or lentil meze. Totally yummy with a rustic pate! And yes, they are expensive. But count yourself lucky; I've never seen them under $5.99 a pack here in CA.

[jgm]

I'm glad you posted this. A local grocery has recently turned into an upscale Super Walmart, and has an imported cheese section. Along with the cheese, they have several selections of fairly expensive crackers I've never seen before, but I think it does include this brand. I will look for them. Every now and then, it's nice to drive over there on my lunch hour, purchase a cheese I've never tried before, plus some fruit and crackers, and have a light lunch. Beats the heck out of Burger King.

[tsquare]

It only makes me sad to think that the original bakery is no more and the crackers are made under contract (if I understand how it goes.)

[Fat Guy]

One thing that really irks me about La Panzanella crackers is the packaging. For a long time the store I got them from sold them in 8-ounce plastic bags. This was a stupid way to package large, fragile crackers that needed to be shipped all over the country, placed on shelves by violent stockboys, and carried home in grocery bags underneath cucumbers and cantaloupes. It was always a project to riffle through the bags on the shelf to find the one with all unbroken crackers, and then to get that bag to the register and home without breaking the crackers. Of course, they break the second you bite one anyway, but still. When you're paying this much for crackers you want them whole at least for a moment.

Now, an even stupider La Panzanella packaging method has appeared at my local store: the most poorly conceived box I've seen in recent memory. The one advantage of the box is that it prevents breakage, or at least it should. Because you can't actually see all the crackers inside the box, there's no way to be sure. You can see the front cracker, though, because the crackers are still in a clear plastic bag but there are two windows in the front of the box. I shouldn't call them windows, though, because a window implies a windowpane. These are just cutouts with no plastic in the frame. Are you starting to see why this is a bad idea? That's right: once you open the interior bag for the first time, breaking the seal, the box no longer acts to keep the crackers fresh or protected from pests. It has two big holes in it!

Worse, and I can't imagine this is just a random occurrence, the boxes appeared at the same time as a massive price increase. Worse, the boxes act to conceal the price increase from unwary shoppers. That's because, while the old bags contained 8 ounces, the new boxes contain 5 ounces. Yet the new boxes are, at my retailer, only a dollar less. So that's $4.99 for the 8-ounce bag and $3.99 for the 5-ounce box. That's $13 a pound.

[Alex]

I guess it's time to start buying those five-pound foodservice boxes.

More seriously, though, the numbers you mentioned reflect about a 28% increase in the retail price. Do you think this is unreasonable given the ~80% increase in the cost of wheat futures since last summer, with a corresponding increase in the wholesale price of flour, plus the huge increase in the price of gasoline and other petroleum products?

[Fat Guy]

Well, I don't actually know where the increase is coming from -- whether it's something happening on the producer side or something specific to my retailer. In other words, for all I know the stupid bags are still available at $10 per pound and my retailer just switched to the stupid boxes. But assuming increased prices on the producer side I think it would be unreasonable because 1- at $10 a pound for crackers the price of an input like flour is pretty much irrelevant -- it's probably a difference on the order of an increase from 15 to 25 cents for the flour that goes into that $10 (now $13) pound; 2- other bread products I've been buying have not shown 30% price increases; 3- I don't appreciate the sneaky nature of swapping 5-ounce for 8-ounce packages, especially when the 5-ounce package looks bigger at first glance on account of the box (I expect that sort of thing from Frito-Lay, not from class-act manufacturers and retailers); and 4-the last thing I want to do, if the company's costs really do justify a higher price, is pay more for packaging on top of that higher price.

[Fat Guy]

I took a look at some archived shots of the La Panzanelle website. The box packaging does appear to be new, though I can't be sure exactly when it came on the scene. It did not appear on the website last summer, though.

[CaliPoutine]

Have you ever tried making your own crackers? Its probably a heck of a lot cheaper and you'd get tons more.

I've never made my own, but I'm contemplating it.

Btw, the shop where I was working, sold homeade flatbread crackers for 17.99lb. The sous chef rolled them thin using a pasta machine.

[Fat Guy]

I can't imagine that I could do as good a job as the La Panzanella people, but then again I've never tried. You go first and report back!

[CaliPoutine]

I can't imagine that I could do as good a job as the La Panzanella people, but then again I've never tried. You go first and report back!

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Oh, I think you sell yourself short : ).

I just pulled out the KA flour whole grain baking book and they're are over half a dozen cracker recipes. If only I had a pasta machine( the one piece of kitchen equipment I dont own).

EG member Desertculinary has a post on the mulitseedcracker bread from the above mentioned book. You can find it in his personal blog here.

Edited May 25, 2008 by CaliPoutine (log)

[dls]

I was at my local Whole Foods today and saw the La Panzanella croccantini in the 8 oz. plastic bags @ $6.99 ($13.98/lb.). A 40% increase since the original post in less than a year.

BTW, a quick check showed that 20%-25% of each bag was broken crumbs.

Edited May 26, 2008 by dls (log)

[Katie Meadow]

I buy these crackers regularly and I haven't seen any boxes yet--but I am forewarned. I am buying the 8 oz. see-thru eminently crushable packages for $6.50, which is the same as I have been paying for a couple of years. When desperate I pay $6.95 for the same package at my other usual haunt. I've never seen them for less than $6.50 here, but I don't shop too many different places.

I made crackers exactly once. They were really delicious but far more work than I ever want to spend on crackers. Especially when Panzanellas make me so happy. Except for the price and the packaging, of course.

[paulpigott]

Hi, I'm Paul Pigott, the owner of La Panzanella. We are a small, Seattle-based company, and I'd like to thank you for your feedback, both good and bad. I'd like to respond to your comments about our product as succinctly as possible, and hopefully won't come across as too belligerent or defensive!

Regarding our packaging, we now offer the croccantini to our distributors (who in turn offer to the retailers) in the familiar 8 oz bag and the new 5 oz box. The retailers buy from the distributors the one they think will sell best in their area. The box, of course, provides better protection against breakage and a lower price.

We sell the box to our distributors (we rarely sell directly to stores) at 37% below our bag price, since the box has 37% fewer ounces. We expected that our distributors and retailers would keep roughly the same relative proportion between the products as they add their markups, but we naturally have no say in the matter, and it sounds like that is not always the case.

Regarding our price to distributors, we have not raised our prices to distributors since the middle of 2007. Our flour costs have doubled since last summer, but we have decided to hold to the current level until 2009 if possible. However, there is no doubt that our distributors and retailers are raising prices of almost all of the items they sell, not just ours, which we all see when we pay the grocery bill!

Breakage of the crackers is the single biggest complaint we receive. We also receive the most compliments, aside from the taste of the crackers, about the classic simplicity of our bags! These two things are in contradiction, and so we have let the market decide for us. The crackers continue to grow in popularity, so we decided to not change the bags, but work on improving the shipping cases to prevent breakage. We have improved the cases tremendously, and so receive fewer complaints from our distributors, but some breakage does occur. But, at the store, people naturally choose the unbroken crackers first (even if the first thing one does is break them in order to eat them at home!), so that may explain why one sees a fair amount of breakage in the remaining ones at the store--all the "good" ones were taken first!

As far as the box not allowing one to see all the crackers to examine for breakage, well, only if we had a 100% clear plastic container would that be possible. We actually explored doing that, but plastic is prohibitively expensive (it's petroleum based) and the last thing we wanted to do was to choose to raise our costs and have to pass that on to consumers. That's also why we didn't put plastic in the openings in the box. Steven, thanks for the feedback on the small windows of our box though--we'll see if there is a way to provide a little better product visibility without ruining the structural integrity of the box.

Our original bakery has indeed closed (we had a small retail and bread operation in addition to baking the crackers) as we wanted to focus on the crackers. We have now moved the bakery to just outside of downtown Seattle. We do not outsource the baking of the product because quality control is very important to us. These crackers are actually very difficult to make--some days we have to throw away over 30% of our product because it didn't bake to our standards. (Actually, we don't throw away the waste, we give it to a local composting company). But I'd rather throw away all of a day's baking rather than ship something we can't be proud of.

I hope the above helps addresses some of your questions and comments. Let me close by reiterating that I greatly appreciate ALL of your feedback, as well as your support of our crackers.

[prasantrin]

Paul--thanks for chiming in. It's always great to hear things from the owner's perspective.

Can I suggest selling those throw-away rejects as seconds? You'd probably have people lining up outside your factory door to buy them.

[paulpigott]

Rona, thanks for the suggestion. What we do with the crackers that bake properly but break prior to packaging is to put them in a samples case and send for free to our distributors and retailers with their regular orders. At the store the sample pieces often end up being paired with a cheese or a spread like tapenade to expose customers to both products. We give to the compost folks only those crackers that didn't bake properly.

[Katie Meadow]

Paul, thanks for your considered response to this thread. Clearly these crackers have some dedicated fans, including myself.

Unless the shelf supply of the bagged crackers is very low and the packages have obviously been tossed about I can usually find a pack that has minimal breakage.

Just in case you want to make sure that I am as anal-retentive as you must imagine, here's why I prefer the bag to the box (which I haven't seen yet): I definitely want to know if the bag has crushed crackers, but I also want to avoid ones that have been over-baked. I like mine very pale. If a package has more than a couple of toasty looking crackers I won't buy it if I can help it. How picky is that? Well, I'm paying just upwards of 80 cents a cracker, so...pretty picky.

Complaints aside, I love these crackers and it's rare that I don't have a back-up bag in the cupboard at all times.

[jayhay]

Yes, thank you Paul.

I haven't tried your crackers yet, but I see they're available at Stong's Market, my neighbourhood store here in Vancouver, so I'll give them a try.

[paulpigott]

Katie, thanks for your kind words. I don't think you are being picky at all by looking for the lighter croccantini! We have many customers who like them exactly the way you do, and have others who prefer them mostly dark. Nothing wrong with either, it's just a matter of taste. We try to navigate down the middle by baking them with some light browning of the bubbles on top, and a whiter color for the rest of the cracker. Usually we do OK in that regard. But, our dough preparation process has some steps that are somewhat unusual, and for reasons we don't fully understand (even after 10 years of making the cracker) it creates inconsistencies in the bake, including big swings in the color. I liken it to herding cats. You think things are under control for a moment, and then the cats take off in all directions and show you who's really boss!

BTW, we are exploring the concept of adding a couple of new flavor/seasoning ideas for the croccantini line. I hope I'm not breaking any eGullet rules with this (my apologies in advance if so), but we would welcome your suggestions for new flavors or seasonings. Currently we have are Original, Rosemary, Black Pepper, Sesame, Garlic, Fennel, Tomato-Oregano, Onion and Whole Wheat. We are especially interested in ideas for flavors that have a bit more kick, since, excepting the Black Pepper, all of our seasonings are quite mild.

Feel free to post your suggestions here or email them to me directly at paul@lapanzanella.com, whichever is more convenient (or allowed). Thank you.

Thanks again for your feedback!

[prasantrin]

Caraway. I love crackers with caraway.

[onehsancare]

Salty. Not just a light sprinkling of salt to make them taste good, but a healthy dose of sea salt so you notice the salt.

[CaliPoutine]

I saw these today at Big Lots in MI. They were 3.00 a package. They had fennel, black pepper and rosemary. I was going to buy one, but they expired on Oct 21st!!

[Shalmanese]

BTW, we are exploring the concept of adding a couple of new flavor/seasoning ideas for the croccantini line.  I hope I'm not breaking any eGullet rules with this (my apologies in advance if so), but we would welcome your suggestions for new flavors or seasonings.  Currently we have are Original, Rosemary, Black Pepper, Sesame, Garlic, Fennel, Tomato-Oregano, Onion and Whole Wheat.  We are especially interested in ideas for flavors that have a bit more kick, since, excepting the Black Pepper, all of our seasonings are quite mild.

Feel free to post your suggestions here or email them to me directly at paul@lapanzanella.com, whichever is more convenient (or allowed).  Thank you.

Thanks again for your feedback!

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Is there any possibility of a bacon cracker?

[paulpigott]

I saw these today at Big Lots in MI.  They were 3.00 a package.  They had fennel, black pepper and rosemary.  I was going to buy one, but they expired on Oct 21st!!

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The crackers have at least a 6 month shelf life since we upgraded our packaging last summer. We have confirmed the extended shelf life with a third party testing company, but just to be doubly sure we have continued to print the date showing only a 4 months expiration, and will do so until the first of next year. That will put us out around 8 months. So the crackers should taste just fine if you want to check them out. Maybe you can ask for a further discount since they are past the expiration date.

[paulpigott]

BTW, we are exploring the concept of adding a couple of new flavor/seasoning ideas for the croccantini line.  I hope I'm not breaking any eGullet rules with this (my apologies in advance if so), but we would welcome your suggestions for new flavors or seasonings.  Currently we have are Original, Rosemary, Black Pepper, Sesame, Garlic, Fennel, Tomato-Oregano, Onion and Whole Wheat.   We are especially interested in ideas for flavors that have a bit more kick, since, excepting the Black Pepper, all of our seasonings are quite mild.

Feel free to post your suggestions here or email them to me directly at paul@lapanzanella.com, whichever is more convenient (or allowed).  Thank you.

Thanks again for your feedback!

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Is there any possibility of a bacon cracker?

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Wow, that does sound good, I must say. Thanks for the suggestion, and I wish we had time to act on it. We have been preparing for the past few months to launch 3 new spicy flavors in January: Chipotle, Red Chile, and Serrano/Lime. They all have a couple of other seasonings as well. It's the same cracker, but in a smaller size, about 3"X4", rather than the usual 4"X7". The bags will be 4 oz rather than 8 oz. too, so the price point in the retail stores should be budget friendly (though, as mentioned above, we don't control that!). It will be a fun cracker with some heat, a real departure from our other flavors. Hope people like 'em! Thanks again for the suggestion about the bacon flavor.