Triscuits are a solidly average cracker; aside from their unique texture, there’s nothing too special about them. That’s what makes it all the more surprising that Triscuits were the subject of a riveting Twitter thread involving electricity. Twitter user Sage Boggs’ thread on the subject became so popular that he changed his bio to “Triscuit guy.”
Sage’s story begins several years ago, when he randomly saw a box of Triscuits at a party and wondered aloud about the origin of the name. “It’s clearly based on the word ‘BISCUIT,’ but what does the ‘TRI’ mean?”
People guessed that the “tri” probably stands for three, as it usually does. But no one could figure out the truth, even after Googling, so they literally emailed Nabisco to ask. That’s when things got really strange.
Nabisco wrote back, and they said that the “tri” doesn’t mean three, but that nobody knows what it does mean. “No business records survived which specifically explain the origins or inspiration for the name Triscuit,” the email says.
Naturally, Sage had to keep on digging, so he Googled even harder and found some early Triscuit advertisements. They showed that, in the early days of the company, the selling point of Triscuits is that they were “baked by electricity” — back when electricity was a new thing.
“That’s when it clicked,” he wrote. “TRISCUIT MEANS ‘ELECTRICITY BISCUIT.'”
Amazingly, the Triscuits social media team saw this thread and retweeted it to confirm this new fact. “We had to go all the way up the ladder bt we CAN confirm,” they wrote.
We’ll never look at Triscuits the same again.
