Absolutely crackers

Rice crackers are a common food for coeliacs as a gluten free alternative to wheat based crackers, however, I recently discovered that some "rice" crackers contain wheat!!

We were visiting close friends who served cheese and crackers. There were both standard wheat crackers and also two flavors of rice crackers.

After getting home, my mum (who is also a coeliac) was not at all well and we started talking about what might have made her ill yet had only had a slight affect on me. In the end, the only thing we could think of was the rice crackers as I had only eaten on of the sesame ones as I preferred the basil pesto (my usual favourite). Mum on the other hand was particularly enjoying the texture of the sesame rice crackers which was what caused our suspicions to begin with. But they were rice crackers, so how could it have been them? There must have been something else. The friends know about our condition and had specially made sure that they had rice crackers for us. The next day we were in the supermarket and took a close look at the available crackers and to our horror, we found "sesame and wheat" flavored crackers on the same shelf as the usual rice crackers and in the same type of packaging.

It turns out that these are a product created by Fantastic which they call "Rice and Cracked Wheat" crackers as opposed to "Rice Crackers" which are gluten free. You can find a picture of these rice and cracked wheat crackers at the bottom of this webpage. Sadly, they have really similar packaging to several brands of rice crackers and the crackers are the same shape and size too!

The moral of the story is the usual, of always checking the labels. So to reiterate, Fantastic's rice crackers are gluten free, however, a different product produced by them does contain gluten and not only looks very similar, but is also often located on the same supermarket shelf, so pay careful attention!

Posted by Rory on Jan 30th, 2010 under Gluten In Unexpected Places | Permalink | Comments(0) | Tweet | Facebook