Are Prawn Crackers Healthy? What's Actually in Your Keropok

Keropok turns up everywhere in Singapore — beside the nasi lemak, in the snack aisle, in the CNY tin. It is one of those foods nobody really questions until someone asks the obvious thing: are prawn crackers healthy?

Short answer: keropok is not the villain it is sometimes made out to be, but it is also not the prawn-based protein snack the name suggests. Here is what is actually inside the packet, and which numbers on the label are worth your attention.

Prawn crackers are mostly starch, not prawn

A traditional prawn cracker is a dough of starch — usually tapioca or sago — blended with ground prawn and seasoning, then shaped, steamed, sliced and dried into hard pellets. Those pellets are later deep-fried, which is when they puff into the airy discs you recognise.

The prawn is real, but in most commercial keropok it works as a flavouring rather than the bulk of the product. You can check this yourself without any nutrition knowledge: ingredients are listed in descending order of weight, so if tapioca starch appears first and prawn appears third or fourth, you know roughly where you stand. (More on that in our guide to reading the ingredients list on a Singapore snack packet.) One practical consequence: there is genuine crustacean protein in there, so keropok is never safe for anyone with a shellfish allergy.

The frying is where the numbers come from

This is the part most people underestimate. In a review of oil uptake during deep-fat frying published in the International Journal of Food Science and Technology, Ziaiifar and colleagues split fried starchy foods into thick products like french fries, which are only partly dehydrated, and thin, almost completely dehydrated products such as crisps and crackers. Those thin products, the review notes, "present a high fat content (between 30% and 40%)".

The same review makes a second, counterintuitive point: oil is absorbed mainly during cooling, not during the frying itself. As the product leaves the oil and the steam pressure inside it drops, surface oil gets drawn into the porous structure — which is why a quick shake of the basket does far less than people assume. Structurally, a fried keropok is a starch sponge dipped in oil — which is also exactly why it tastes so good.

How that compares to Singapore's own benchmark

You do not have to guess at what "too much fat" means, because the Health Promotion Board publishes the thresholds it uses for the Healthier Choice Symbol. In HPB's HCS Nutrient Guidelines, a crisp or chip must come in under 19 g of fat and at or below 400 mg of sodium per 100 g. Savoury biscuits and crackers get more room — under 25 g fat, under 10 g saturated fat, under 420 mg sodium per 100 g — but must also be at least 30% wholegrain.

Put the two facts side by side and the picture is clear enough: a typical deep-fried thin starch snack at 30–40% fat sits well above the line HPB draws for crisps. That does not make keropok unsafe — it places it in the treat column rather than the everyday column. Do check your own packet rather than assuming, though; some brands now bake or air-dry their crackers, and those numbers look quite different.

Sodium is probably the bigger problem

Fat gets the attention, but salt is where Singapore actually has a measurable issue. According to the Ministry of Health, the National Nutrition Survey 2022 found that nine in ten Singapore residents exceeded the recommended sodium limit of 2,000 mg a day — and on average consumed about twice that. The same release notes that saturated fat made up 36% of total fat consumed, against a recommendation of no more than 30%.

Keropok is salt-forward by design, and it is usually eaten alongside food that is already salty. That combination, repeated daily, matters more than any single packet.

One clarification, because it gets muddled constantly: MOH is extending Nutri-Grade labelling from mid-2027, but that extension covers salt, sauces, seasonings, instant noodles and cooking oil. Snacks and crackers are not in scope. Nutri-Grade marks on your keropok packet are not coming — the Healthier Choice Symbol remains the scheme that applies to packaged foods like this.

What a sensible portion actually looks like

HPB's HealthHub guidance on choosing healthier snacks uses a simple rule of thumb: aim for snacks under 200 Calories, ideally under 100 for a light one. For scale, it lists four rice crackers at 55 Calories, 20 g of unsalted popcorn at 75 Calories, and one HCS-marked pack of crisps at under 100 Calories. Its blunt tip for this category: choose non-fried snacks and low-salt, oven-baked chips.

The trap with keropok is not any single piece — each weighs almost nothing. It is that the airiness makes them disappear quickly while the fat stays concentrated per gram. Fifteen crackers eaten absent-mindedly is a very different snack from three eaten with a plate of rice.

So — healthy, or not?

Prawn crackers are a flavour accessory, not a nutritious snack — and they were never really pretending otherwise. There is nothing wrong with a few alongside a meal. What does not hold up is treating them as a protein food because of the word "prawn", or eating them by the bag on the assumption that something so light can't add up. Read the per-100 g column rather than the per-serving one, look for a Healthier Choice Symbol, and check whether the crackers were fried or baked — those three habits beat any list of "good" and "bad" snacks.

Looking for a cracker that does a bit more work

If you like the crunch but want a snack that brings protein and fibre along with it, that is roughly the brief we set ourselves at HexaCrunch. Our crackers are baked rather than fried, built on wholegrain brown rice, and take their protein from cricket flour — so the nutrition comes from the recipe rather than from a flavouring. The Try-All 3-Pack is the easiest place to start.

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