Rice crackers. They’re delicious and very popular. No longer a specialty item to be found only in your local Asian food market, you can find them nowadays very easily in pretty much any standard American supermarket. Not surprisingly though, when you look at the packaging you’ll find that the ultra-thin crispy delights are manufactured and produced in Asia. Which raises the question, why does such a simple product have to take such a long trip across the world just to end up in Aisle No.5 with all the other crackers?

This article is not a foodie review of the crackers themselves, for that you’ll have to go to a food-related website and do your research there. Instead, the focus here is on why the seller of a product such as rice crackers would make the economic decision that it’s more profitable for them to have the product made half way around the world and then shipped to America for sale as opposed to just making it here in some local manufacturing plant.

There are plenty of brands of rice crackers available here for sale: KA-ME, Sesmark (both from the same company, Panos), Asian Gourmet, and several others seem to be the most popular. They’re all pretty similar, but beyond their physical appearance they all share one thing in common: they are made in an Asian country and distributed by an American company. In the cases above, that would be Thailand and China. The packaging is similar too. All come packed in plastic wrappings, about one foot long, two inches high and about four inches wide. They weigh in the neighborhood of a mere 3-4 ounces per package.  When you pick up a package, it seems rather light for the size. That makes sense of course since much of their appeal is that they are a “light” alternative to wheat or corn based crackers. Another commonality that they all share is that basically each light cracker is made from extremely cheap ingredients. After all, rice is about as cheap of a food product as we have.

So one has to wonder then, if these crackers are so light and flimsy, and they are made from such cheap ingredients, and they only sell for $2-$3 per package, yet each package is noticeably large for its weight, then how is it that it’s been determined to be beneficial for these companies to have the crackers produced in Asia and then shipped all the way to America instead of just baking and packaging them here? Due to the size of each package, described above, each package takes up plenty of space. And while the package is light, there are still only so many that can be wrapped in a single pallet based on their size. How can these pallets be stacked into cargo containers, trucked and/or sent via train to shipping ports, loaded onto giant cargo ships, and then sailed around the world, all at a cost that would still have them more profitable to their sellers than if they were produced more locally? At the price point they are selling at, how much more are the producers of these crackers saying it would cost them to make the crackers here instead of making them there and then shipping them? Add on top of that all of the other issues concerning shipping beyond the obvious costs of the boat, the fuel, the insurance and the labor: there are added costs of legal issues, tax issues and financing issues that come into play when dealing with international commerce. Yet none of that seems to matter, apparently the answer is it simply costs more to make them here than to do it the way they’re doing it now.

Then there are the environmental issues. In a world where we are bombarded with pleas to “buy locally”, particularly when it comes to our food, it would seem that having simple crackers shipped around the world would be something environmentalists would be screaming about! How much fossil fuel does one of those cargo ships use anyway?

This is not about the campaign to “Buy American”. This is about questioning how and why we do certain simple things, often without the public spending much time thinking about them or their consequences. On so many levels the question applies of why aren’t these crackers just produced here? The cost of the ingredients is borderline insignificant. The packaging is as cheap as can be as well. So what is it about our economy and our ability to manufacture even the most simple product like a cracker at a cost effective level that a business would decide it’s just cheaper to ship it from the other side of the globe?