Peanut butter is a national treasure. In 2019, US peanut butter sales raked in approximately $2.3 billion. Americans supposedly eat a whopping 700 million pounds of the spread each year, with the average kid scarfing down 1,500 PB&Js before their high school graduation.
But peanut butter is an ingredient that goes well beyond sandwiches. I’m talking about these brown butter rice crispy treats. And a punchy, savory dressing for your next bowl of udon noodles. And the creamy-tangy dip that’ll level-up your air fryer chicken tenders.
So, which store-bought peanut butter is the best? Jif, Skippy, and Peter Pan dominate the US market, but there’s a whole world of PB waiting to be explored. To find out which jar offers the most bang for buck, a handful of BA staffers tested seven popular brands, including Stop & Shop, Target’s Good & Gather, and Reese’s. (Sorry to the Smucker’s stans, but for the sake of consistency we disqualified unsweetened, non-homogenized peanut butters, including those labeled as “natural.”)
We tasted them with a spoon first and then spread on a saltine cracker, judging each on flavor and texture. Here’s the full scoop.
Photograph by Isa Zapata
The ingredients: peanuts; cane sugar; palm oil; and salt.
The flavor: Everything is wrong here. “The flavor is rough,” said senior cooking editor Emma Laperruque. “It doesn’t taste like peanut butter.” And associate cooking editor Antara Sinha noticed a strange “floral” aftertaste. “It’s so weird,” she said. The texture is another drawback: “It’s loose, oily, and hard to swallow,” said test kitchen coordinator Inés Anguiano. Associate visuals editor Marc Williams just kept asking, “Are you sure this is peanut butter?”
Photograph by Isa Zapata
The ingredients: dry roasted peanuts; sugar; hydrogenated rapeseed, cottonseed, and soybean oils; molasses; mono and diglycerides; and salt.
