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Turn octopus, spaghetti, and more of your favorite foods into crackers with Senbei Maker 2

Master Blaster Aug 25, 2026
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You haven’t truly eaten a food until you’ve made it into a cracker.

Who doesn’t love a good cracker? They’re dry, portable, can be customized with a vast range of toppings, or be used as toppings themselves. But the current range of commercially available crackers could be better. It seems the cracker industry is largely hung up on cheese and salt for the most part.

But Japan’s premier random appliance maker Thanko has come out with a product that can unleash the full potential of crackers by allowing us to create flavors limited only by the human imagination. The machine is called Senbei Maker 2, wherein “senbei” is the Japanese word for cracker, although a senbei is typically thicker and harder than some conventional crackers like saltines.

The machine harnesses the patented technique of making any food of your choice into a cracker by heating it up and squeezing it really hard. The following video shows it in action, creating crackers out of French fries, melon pan, spaghetti, and whitebait.

With a little ingenuity, there’s no limit to what you can transform into a cracker. Note that while certain, highly mushable foods like french fries will naturally unify upon crackerification, some might need a little help. For example, in the video, a little batter is added to help the white bait stick together, and cheese can also make a sturdy and flavorful matrix.

▼ It’s easy as one, two, three.

Difficult-to-squish foods like walnuts or jawbreakers should also be avoided or pre-crushed into a finer crumb or powder so they don’t damage the machine. But other than that, you’re pretty much free to make crackers out of whatever you want. In fact, Thanko even suggests going ahead and tossing a whole octopus in there.

There’s no better feeling than being able to compress all your favorite dishes, whether it’s duck a l’orange or wasps, into edible discs that you can carry around in a file folder. Just don’t put a cracker in the cracker makers. That’s a paradox that might make reality collapse in on itself.

Senbei Maker 2 sells for around 5,500 yen (US$35) at various online retailers, including Thanko’s own website. It’s not clear what improvements were made on the original Senbei Maker for this model, making it kind of like the Evil Dead 2 of cracker makers, in which it’s hard to tell whether this is a true sequel or a reboot.

And also like Evil Dead 2, it doesn’t really matter, because its just a whole lot of gooey fun, so what are you waiting for? Pick one up and get crackering.

Source, images: PR Times
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