First commercial peanut butter

The pre-Columbian peoples of Latin and South America, whose empires flourished between the 13th and 16th centuries, ground roasted peanuts into a paste, though it was a far cry from the creamy spread we’re familiar with today. A patent for a commercial ground-peanut paste was filed in the US by Canadian chemist Marcellus Gilmore Edson in 1884, although this, too, did not fully resemble the modern interpretation of this product. Though none of the origin stories for what we now deem to be peanut butter are completely verifiable, health food pioneer and cereal businessman John Harvey Kellogg (USA) widely promoted himself as the inventor of peanut butter, after filing two patents pertaining to the product and its manufacture on 4 November 1895.

The first patent (No. 567901), granted on 15 September 1896, was for a "Food Compound" which produced "an improved article of manufacture, the alimentary product composed of completely digested starch, completely-emulsified vegetable oil such as described, and thoroughly cooked and finely-divided vegetable proteins derived from nuts, as specified." The process described involved taking raw edible nuts, preferably peanuts or almonds, blanching them to remove their skins, and then boiling them for several hours. The nuts were then crushed and passed through rollers to separate out "a fine and comparatively dry and nearly white nutmeal" and a "moist, pasty, adhesive, and brown" butter or paste. The second patent (No. 604493), granted on 24 May 1898, was for a "Process of Producing Alimentary Products" from "edible nuts, preferably peanuts". The process for making the paste again involved boiling the peanuts, but noted that roasting was a possible alternative. The substance was then heated in sealed cans to obtain "a product differing in many ways from the original paste" with a consistency akin to cheese.

Given that the process Kellogg initially patented for his health-food diet mainly focused on raw, steamed peanuts, as opposed to roasted ones, some scholars consider St Louis snack-food purveyor George Bayle to be the true "father of peanut butter". Like Kellogg, he billed himself as such, even though he never took out a patent for the product he developed around 1894. In any case, Kellogg’s use of the word “butter” to describe his paste, and his endless promotion of the product, earned him the greater attention, which he capitalized on through his Sanitas Nut Food Company, which was selling peanut butter by 1897. It soon became a fad food.

James Lambert, who worked at Kellogg’s sanitarium, is also said to have been the first to make peanut butter there, in 1894. After leaving Kellogg’s employ he went on to invent a hand grinder for making the butter and patented a more powerful model in 1899. But the many different brands of peanut butter that were sold in the early 20th century all had the same problem: the oil separated from the solids and eventually turned rancid. In 1922, chemist Joseph Rosefield patented a process that kept the oil from separating by using partially hydrogenated oil, and the Skippy brand that he launched in 1932 is still highly popular today.

The American peanut butter manufacturer with the greatest longevity is the Ohio-based Krema Nut Company, which first brought its product to market in 1908.