Cracking the Nut

Quality control and strict food safety standards ensure that your favorite peanut butter is delicious — and safe — to eat (even by the spoonful).

Whether spread with jelly on white bread, stuffed inside a candy bar, or eaten straight from the jar, it’s no secret that Americans love their peanut butter. A recent survey showed that the country’s favorite nut butter is eaten by more than 290 million Americans (that’s nearly 90% of the entire population!). It’s no surprise, then, that peanut butter sales in the United States amounted to approximately $1.82 billion in 2015 alone.

With such high demand, how do manufacturers churn out millions of pounds of the creamy (or crunchy) stuff while following strict quality control standards? Let’s take a closer look at peanut butter’s journey from a vine on a Georgia farm to the shelf in your pantry.

From the Farm to the Warehouse

As you might expect, the main ingredient used in peanut butter is peanuts, which account for 90 to 95% of the contents of a typical jar. Many peanuts grown in the United States are cultivated for the sole purpose of making peanut butter, but the peanut most often used is the Runner type grown in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, which has a higher yield than other varieties.

As with other agricultural products, peanut butter’s life cycle begins on a farm. As soon as the peanuts are ready to be harvested, they’re removed from the vines by mechanical pickers and transported to warehouses for cleaning. After the peanuts are shelled and cleaned, they’re stored in a warehouse before being inspected and shipped to food processors.

Mixed Nuts

The first step in creating peanut butter is dry roasting, during which the nuts are roasted at several hundred degrees for an hour or so. The roasted nuts are then cooled to a much lower temperature, blanched with heat or water to shed the skin, and finally ground into a paste with other ingredients like salt, dextrose, and hydrogenated oil stabilizer. The peanut butter is then left to settle in vacuum sealed jars, labeled for consumption, then packed into cartons and placed in storage to await distribution.

Peanut butter can be produced in individual batches, but large manufacturers generally produce it continuously, transporting peanuts from the roaster to the cooler and the cooler to the grinder in a single uninterrupted process. Since continuous production requires less manpower, it’s a much more efficient strategy for most producers. Nevertheless, some smaller manufacturers still prefer to mix their peanut butter individually, allowing them to give special attention to each batch.