Crackers gone wild

When you go to a fancy food show, you start out all bright-eyed and hungry, but as you're charging down the 149th aisle filled with cheese and chips and barbecue sauces, you start to get pretty persnickety about what you're willing to stop and taste.

It's hard to say what actually catches your attention when you're feeling that jaded about food. Some of it is eye-catching packaging, some is the interesting people behind the product, and some is just happenstance.

So here's a group of crackers that each in its way made me stop to taste.

1. 34° Crispbread: Their tagline is "a most clever cracker." I simply had to stop and ask what made the cracker clever. The answer is that the Colorado-based company is the clever one, because the crackers were just as inarticulate as any other cracker I've met. But they were super-thin and crisp, so that's a good thing. They come in Natural, Sesame, Cracked Pepper, and Rosemary. Check them out at 34-degrees.com.

2. Food Should Taste Good: I stopped by the booth of the aptly named Food Should Taste Good, because I already knew how good their products are, and I could see they had three new flavors that I had to try. They didn't disappoint. The new flavors are Cinnamon (really good), Potato & Chive, and Lime. Check all their other flavors (including chocolate!) on their website. P.S. You gotta love that the lime chips are shaped like a lime wedge.

3. raincoast crisps: These crackers from Vancouver are densely packed with fruit and nuts. I stopped to taste these because I really liked the name and the packaging, and a couple of aisles earlier I had met the fig-growing cooperative that supplies them with the fruit for their Fig and Olive crisps. Other crisp flavors are Rosemary Raisin Pecan, Cranberry Hazelnut, Salty Date and Almond. Read more about them at raincoastcrisps.com.