The stalwart spread is undergoing a huge boost in popularity as artisan versions favoured by gym bunnies and healthy eaters are driving sales
In 2012, Stuart Franklin and his wife Kathryn returned to the UK after seven years in New Zealand. During their time there, they set up Proper Crisps, Australasia’s first manufacturer of handmade crisps. Back in their native Yorkshire after selling their business, life was good, but they found they were missing one thing about New Zealand more than anything else: peanut butter. Not the kind you can get in any corner shop, supermarket or newsagent, laden with palm oil, sugar and preservatives; it was the pure stuff they craved, made solely from peanuts. Such a thing is big business in Australia and New Zealand, early adopters of peanut butter. In the UK six years ago, it was a scarce commodity.
Knowing that there is little more to making peanut butter than roasting peanuts and grinding them to a pulp, they began making their own in their kitchen. Friends and family were grateful recipients of any surplus and their reactions provided the encouragement the Franklins needed to set up another company. Proper Nutty was founded in 2014.
From a rented factory space in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, the pair make two varieties of peanut butter – one slightly salted, one unsalted – and sell directly to customers from their website and supply independent retailers all over the UK, as well as about 50 branches of Morrisons in the Yorkshire area. They currently make 1,000 jars a day (a day that regularly starts at 4am and ends at 7pm). Demand, however, is such that by the end of March, Proper Nutty will have moved to a new factory just outside Huddersfield, nine miles from the current unit, where production will increase to 1,000 jars of peanut butter an hour.
Proper Nutty’s expansion is evidence of a wider peanut-butter boom in the UK. It has been on sale here since the 1930s, with Sun-Pat – today one of the UK’s biggest brands, making 4,510 tonnes a year – launched in 1946. In the days of rationing, peanut butter was a cheap protein source for children and a guilty pleasure for adults, but it wasn’t long before things began to change. In 2016, Whole Earth became Britain’s top-selling brand. The “healthy” peanut butter-maker doesn’t add sugar, although it does use sustainable palm oil. The brand was created by American brothers Craig and Gregory Sams in 1967, who operated out of their forward-thinking London organic shop, Seeds.
Our favourite way to consume peanut butter remains spreading it on toast, but it has become popular in sandwiches, dropped into smoothies, in baking and, increasingly, eaten straight from the jar or smeared on the end of a banana ahead of a session in the gym.
The market for spreads is worth just over £512m a year, according to figures compiled by Kantar Worldpanel. Honey is out in front, with a 25% market share, while jam (20%) clings on to its second spot for dear life. If sales of peanut butter continue at their current rate (2017 saw a 17.1% increase on the previous year) and sales of jam continue to dip – down 1.5% on 2016 – peanut butter will overtake preserves this time next year.
Peanut butter’s sales march is no flash in the pan, says Franklin. “We’ve seen double-digit growth for almost 10 years now, which is one of the reasons we’re investing in the new factory. The market for artisanal, pure peanut butter was in its infancy 10 years ago. That’s why we started our business – we couldn’t find what we wanted on the shelves anywhere.”
Where nutritionists once warned us to be wary of fat, more contemporary thinking has sugar as the enemy. Little surprise, then, that jam, marmalade and, in particular, curd – down almost 10% last year – are falling down the menu.
“Five years ago fat was demonised, now it’s sugar,” says Dr Annie Gray, food historian, BBC presenter and author of The Greedy Queen: Eating With Victoria. “Curd combines both, which is, of course, why it’s absolutely delicious, but also why it is slipping out of fashion.”
It is this turnaround by the nutritional community that helps explain peanut butter’s sales boost. Among fitness heads, peanut butter is treated as something of a wonder substance, high in monounsaturated fats, which have been proven to help lower cholesterol, reduce heart disease and lower blood pressure.
Sales of sports nutrition products in the UK have gone up even faster than those of peanut butter, with the total market worth almost £800m in 2017, double what it was in 2012. Peanut butter manufacturers, noticing their product was being swallowed up by calorie-hungry runners and the like, reacted with marketing language designed to attract even more.
Kirstie Hawkins, brand controller of Whole Earth peanut butter, says the biggest growth area for the company has been its 1kg tub, which is particularly popular with athletes, while Franklin says many of the inquiries he gets are from bodybuilders looking to buy Proper Nutty by the case.
If the lucrative peanut butter market is a new thing, the gooey substance itself is anything but. There is evidence the Aztecs used to roast and mash peanuts into a rough paste as far back as the 14th century. Peanut butter as we now know it, however, doesn’t go back quite that far. Its invention can be credited to a number of people. Contrary to popular belief, botanist and inventor George Washington Carver was not one of them. He did, however, come up with more than 100 different products using peanuts including shampoo, chilli sauce, shaving cream and glue, although none became successful.
Canadian pharmacist Marcellus Gilmore Edson got the ball rolling. In 1884, he patented a process for milling legumes between two heated surfaces and mixing with sugar to make a peanut paste, although it was never used in a commercial product. In the US in 1895, Dr John Harvey Kellogg, of Corn Flakes fame, wanted to make a more digestable substitute for butter. He found that boiling the peanuts rather than roasting them achieved that result, and he marketed his product as a protein replacement for patients without any teeth. In his Good Health magazine of January 1896, Kellogg was the first person to use the term “nut butter”. He went on to include the paste in numerous recipes, although stopped short of actually inventing peanut butter.
From that same year, the Atlantic Peanut Refinery’s trademark for “German Peanut-Butter” is the earliest on record, while the Lane Bros Health Co became the first to sell straightforward peanut butter a year later in 1897. In the decade that followed, many more firms popped up selling types of peanut butter, notably Krema, founded in 1908, which remains the oldest peanut butter-maker still in operation. In 1922, the same year the National Peanut Butter Manufacturers Association was founded, Joseph L Rosefield invented a process enabling peanut butter to stay fresh for a year and, a decade later, founded Skippy, today the world’s second-largest manufacturer, behind Jif.
In the US, a nation that has seen two peanut farmers elected president (Thomas Jefferson and Jimmy Carter), peanut butter sales reached $2bn (£1.45bn) in 2017, with 90% of US households eating it. In the UK, peanut butter is consumed by about 40% of households, meaning there is still considerable room for growth.
Gray believes that peanut butter’s success, while a symbol of our growing interest in nutrition, is also indicative of the infantilisation of our choices and our seemingly never-ending obsession with American culture. However, she says that the “hipsterfication” of peanut butter, with its lurch toward an organic, high-quality product, can only be a good thing, particularly if it drives customers to small, independent companies.
“The more options people have, the better,” she says. “Or possibly, the more confusing. What’s happening now is like when companies realised you could make adult chocolate and there was a boom in chocolate flavoured with all these beautiful, grownup things, containing 100% cocoa and so on. Manufacturers have been very clever in identifying new markets and expanding into them, but we all benefit.”