We Taste-Tested 10 Supermarket Creamy Peanut Butters—Here Are Our Favorites
It was the best of times, it was the absolute oiliest (see: worst) of times.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
I normally preface these taste tests by writing nearly verbatim: “The SE team has pulled together X number brands of X Thing We Know You All Love to Eat, which you're likely to find in your local supermarket, and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we loved every minute of doing it!”
I will tell you that that whole first part is true—when it came time to eat and evaluate some easily accessible creamy peanut butter options, we did all the true-to-form testing with all the true-to-form best intentions. But I will not lie to you and say we “loved every minute of doing it.” There was joy, sure. But there was also grimacing, gagging, very dramatic sighing, and a lot of loud outrage from a group of people who just wanted to eat good nut butter in the name of science and reader service. But it turns out a lot of creamy peanut butter out there is very bad and a lot of our editors had some pretty mean things to say about it in turn.
But that’s just a different kind of fun, yeah? And, fine, there were a few we ultimately really liked—even some we totally loved. OK, let’s go!!
The Contenders
365 Unsweetened Creamy Peanut Butter
Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter
Jif Creamy Peanut Butter
Woodstock Organic ‘Smooth & Salted’ Peanut Butter
Peanut Butter & Co. Smooth Operator
Teddie All-Natural Smooth Peanut Butter
365 Unsweetened and Unsalted Creamy Peanut Butter
Smucker’s All-Natural Peanut Butter
Nature’s Promise Creamy Peanut Butter
Once Again Creamy Peanut Butter
The Criteria
A good creamy peanut butter needs no crutches. It doesn’t need bread to absorb a slick of palm oil or separated peanut oil, it doesn’t need jelly to sweeten the experience, and it certainly doesn’t need a sweet fruit pairing to make it more satisfying. To gauge that standalone snackability, we ate many, many spoonfuls of just straight PB. We did not slap any of the samples onto bread, crackers, pretzels, or the like given the above-stated belief that (good) creamy peanut butter should be able to be enjoyed as an island of a snack.
No part of a proper creamy peanut butter-eating experience involves a couple of textures. We’ll allow that some good creamy peanut butters require a quick stir before using them, but once reconstituted, a perfect peanut butter should be velvety smooth and thick yet completely spreadable. No grit, no gum. You should never take a bite of it and think: “Oh, wow, that’s like taking a sip of a very oily drink and a bite of an old bar snack at the same time!”
As for the reconstituting, we spent a 20-second-per-pop minimum mixing each jar ahead of distributing samples. The amount of separation ultimately didn’t correlate to our testers’ tastes, so we know a good-quality product in this realm shouldn’t require a whole-arm workout to ensure proper consistency (though so many of them did)! The best jars reconstituted well within those 20 seconds and did not leave me feeling like I’d legitimately exercised my fingers or biceps, nor did they snap any plastic knives at first mixing pass (again—more on that in a bit).
Beyond texture, we of course evaluated the flavor of each peanut butter. To assess, we looked for bold, toasted nutty flavors with no acrid or otherwise funky aftertaste. Listen. When creamy peanut butter is correct, you have it as a pantry staple because you know it’s going to be easy, satisfying, and smooth.
In our blind tasting, each tester tasted each sample in a random order (each person in a different order) and rated it on a scale of zero to five on the following criteria: spreadability, smoothness, and taste(See more on our tasting methodology below.) We included salted variations, sweetened variations, and unsalted and unsweetened variations. We stayed away from peanut butter “spreads” (which typically contain fewer peanuts and more stabilizers) in favor of identifying a peanutty-as-possible winner. Some testers used water and/or white bread as palate-cleansers between samples. That’s it. Let’s go.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
The Rankings
Woodstock Organic ‘Smooth & Salted’ Peanut Butter: 4/5
This one right here? The only consensus across the whole group. Pre-stir, it was looser than I thought people were going to like, but there was minimal separation to start and a brief stir yielded a smooth and shiny product the group enjoyed. “If it’s a natural peanut butter, it has a smoothness that I haven’t seen in others,” Daniel wrote in his tasting notes. The peanut taste hits you hard up front, everyone said, before mellowing out a bit. Genevieve said the whole bite was “nutty, caramel-like, and [hit] right.” From here on out, people either gave high marks for smoothness and spreadability or for taste—there was not a single other jar that netted high marks in both veins. With an ingredient list that includes just organic dry roasted blanched peanuts and salt, this peanut butter was impressively smooth (not necessarily a given with more “natural” peanut butters).
Jif Creamy Peanut Butter: 3.92/5
My favorite part of taste testing with my coworkers is when they take a bite they feel soooo confident they can place immediately. It is very fun when they’re wrong, but they far more often are right. My notes from their notes on tasting Jif’s Creamy peanut butter are as follows: “So sweet,” “so sweet it almost circles back around to ‘salty,’” “this reminds me of Jif,” “it is…so sweet. It would be good in desserts, milkshakes, smoothies, or as a snack with chocolate,” and “so sweet. Jif?” The thing was a soft, laminated block with absolutely no separation upon opening; I stirred and stirred for Taste Test Integrity’s Sake, but there was no need. The stuff is made of “Roasted Peanuts, Sugar, Contains 2% or Less of: Molasses, Fully Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils (Rapeseed and Soybean), Mono and Diglycerides, Salt.” Anyway, if it walks like an overly processed, viscerally nostalgic duck and talks like an overly processed, viscerally nostalgic duck, it’s going to sneak its way to the top of a Serious Eats taste test.
Peanut Butter & Co. Smooth Operator: 3.67/5
Given how (1) light and (2) distinctly separated this one was out of the gate, I wasn’t sure where it would land. But it reconstituted easily and pleasantly, giving way to high points in smoothness and spreadability from all of our testers. That said: with three grams of added sugar serving, it was sweet-sweet. But listen—if you like a sweet and smooth peanut butter, this is a good pick!
Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter: 3.65/5
Again, Genevieve, with the “Is this Skippy?” note immediately. The ulta-refined sheen and very easy spread gave the stuff away pretty quickly. (Relatedly: My pre-stir notes for this option are nearly identical to my Jif ones—do with that what you will!) It also ate like a dessert, leading Yasmine and Megan to note they likely wouldn’t eat this on its own. I would eat it on its own and be very happy to do it, but that’s my mid-millennial speaking.
Once Again Creamy Peanut Butter: 3.41/5
This one was an odd duck, but, like, in a fun way. It was so, so loose, but not at all separated. Stirring, of course, did nothing, but, sure, I had fun moving gloopy nut water around in circles in a tiny space! It’s just…I barely tipped the jar over the sampling bowl in order to pour so much of it out. You could’ve dripped this bad boy onto a 1° angle and it would’ve found its way to the floor in a second!! But I digress: The product was gentle in all the other ways—smooth, but not too slick, nutty, but not overly so (simply “savory,” even, per one set of notes), and no hint of processed junk. In fact, Once Again’s PB was the only option without mention of the word “processed” in the testers’ notes. Just, ya know. Straight liquid.
Teddie All-Natural Smooth Peanut Butter: 3.41/5
A few things of note by the time we hit this halfway point: People began to remark on “grit,” “salt,” and “stick.” I noted visible chunks in the pre-stir phase and I wasn’t able to physically de-chunk the sample before presenting it, so it wasn’t a surprise to read that everyone called this a significantly chewier experience. Daniel didn’t hate the salt level, but he didn’t love the grit. Everyone loved how it spread in a luxurious, meldable blanket. The color was pretty too. So…chunky and salty “smooth” and spreadable! That’s this one’s shtick. If you like your “creamy” peanut butter to be not-so-secretly chunky, this could be the one for you.
365 Unsweetened Creamy Peanut Butter: 2.6/5
If you don’t have room in your heart for brutally honest peanut butter discourse, this is your heads up to back out now. We’ll start with the positives here: Whole Foods’ Unsweetened Creamy Peanut Butter spreads like a dream. Give it a surface area—any surface area!—and you’d be able to coat it exactly to your liking with this stuff. Otherwise, though, this was a soupy, lackluster option that no one particularly enjoyed eating. In fact, it tasted as though it had been roasted with elderly peanuts a long, long time ago.
365 Unsweetened and Unsalted Creamy Peanut Butter: 2.41/5
If I had to award a superlative for “Most Separated Peanut Butter,” this would’ve taken it. It was an oleaginous party up top and a rock-solid party on the bottom. Nobody hated how it tasted, but it was very hard to get past the grease slick. Daniel called it “liquid goo” and then wrote something almost certainly litigious, so that may be the last you’ll hear of his thoughts for the remainder of the piece. Genevieve most helpfully contextualized the consistency, writing “If you ate hole-y sourdough, it would definitely drip through.”
Nature’s Promise Creamy Peanut Butter: 2.3/5
Listen, I don’t even want to do this anymore, but: this was the most difficult-to-blend of the bunch. I did actually snap a knife trying to do it. Nobody had striking thoughts on the spreadability of the product, but they did mention it tasted like “chemicals,” and ate like “lipstick” and “spackle,” so.
Smucker’s All-Natural Peanut Butter: 2/5
“This peanut butter did not understand the assignment,” per Yasmine. “It's not the peanut butter I want,” wrote Daniel. It was gummy, Megan said. It simply did not feel like a natural product. I snapped another knife attempting to reconstitute this one. And yet: They all said it tasted just fine.
An Honorable (Absent) Mention
I forgot we agreed to do this day-of when I revealed Koeze wasn't part of the tasting samples and I am so tired after having written 2,100 words about peanut butter that my pal Daniel wrote this nice little bite up for me today. Again, this is Daniel writing as me so that I could keep my day moving without further thought to peanut butter:
Daniel was scandalized by the absence of his favorite peanut butter from the tasting—but what can I say, it's not widely available! While this peanut butter was not part of the tasting and therefore can't be ranked with the others, Daniel insists it get an honorable mention because he swears it's so damned good. He describes it as a natural peanut butter that seems to resist extreme separation (some minor separation happens because it's not a homogenized product, but it stirs back together easily), and says it has a classic peanut flavor with a subtle sweetness that seems to come directly from the peanuts themselves given there's no added sugar and just a touch of sea salt.
Our Tasting Methodology
All taste tests are conducted completely blind and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria that vary from sample to sample. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.
Read the original article on Serious Eats.
