We Tasted The "World's Best Peanut Butter"—Here's the Honest Truth
Here at Eat This, Not That!, we really, really love peanut butter. We love learning about all the different health benefits of peanut butter, diving deep into the daily habits of eating peanut butter, and even tracking down the best tasting one. Yet after so many of our taste tests and our research, we were sleeping on a small peanut butter company located in New Zealand known for having the "world's best peanut butter." After winning many awards and raving reviews, it was time for us to know the truth. Is Fix & Fogg truly the world's best peanut butter?
Before even tasting the product, I reached out to the company to ask a few questions. More importantly, where did the title of "world's best" come from? And what makes your peanut butter different from the rest?
Their answers did not disappoint.
The story behind the "world's best peanut butter"
Fix & Fogg was started by a couple in New Zealand about seven years ago, Roman and Andrea Jewell, both on a mission to create the best peanut butter in the world. And it all started with their Super Crunchy peanut butter.
"[Roman] used to handpick the pieces in the crunchy because he was so specific about what he thought the crunchy peanut butter should be like," says Lisa Pijper, Business Development Coordinator at Fix & Fogg. "And it shouldn't just have uniform pieces that are the same size. He wanted there to be some big bits, some little bits, and the right ratio of all those crunchy pieces in the super crunchy."
After perfecting their Super Crunchy peanut butter, Fix & Fogg worked on expanding to different kinds. Offering a smooth peanut butter was obviously in the pipeline, as well as other nut butter staples. Before opening up a shop, they started off in farmer's markets.
As of now, Fix & Fogg has a whole new space to make the peanut butter and uses the original space as a shop where they allow people to taste the peanut butter, buy jars, and even order extravagant slices of peanut butter toast. They recently expanded into the United States and opened up a shop recently in Houston, TX, where they will sell their jars and hopefully soon sell similar toasts on the scene.
What sets Fix & Fogg apart from the rest
While some kinds of peanut butter are mixed with sugar and palm oil to keep it from separating and give it a sweeter taste, Fix & Fogg refuse to be one of them. They are a 100% natural peanut butter with no palm oil—or as Pijper put it, no "nasties." They rely on their perfectly roasted peanuts to give you that perfectly delicious peanut butter taste. Their Super Crunchy peanut butter is made of 99.9% roasted peanuts and the rest is sea salt.
"[Roman] always says that it's a [focus] on all of those small details is what really makes it the best, using literally the best peanuts we can get our hands on," says Pijper. "They have to be roasted perfectly. We have a Pantone color they have to be at. And we use amazing sea salt. So it's about all of the little details. It's really a craft of a product and it's quickly curated."
Along with having pristine roasted peanuts, Fix & Fogg focuses on a range of peanut butter flavors as a way to surprise their audience. The Super Crunchy is certainly a crowd-pleaser, but it isn't nearly as popular as their Everything Butter, which contains eight different kinds of nuts and seeds. It has a peanut butter base and includes hemp, almond, pumpkin, chia, sesame, sunflower, and flaxseed as well. It has won multiple Food Producer Awards in New Zealand in 2020.
So…how does it taste?
Does Fix & Fogg's declaration for being the world's best peanut butter actually live up to the hype? I had to taste it for myself.
Upon opening the jar, I was pleasantly surprised. For a peanut butter with no palm oil to keep it from separating, it is not as oily as some natural peanut butters tend to be. This could also be because I properly stored the peanut butter upside down.
The texture is what I would expect—a natural, gooey peanut butter that sticks to the roof of my mouth. No hints of added sweeteners whatsoever. Clearly.
But the flavor? It's robust, particularly in the Super Crunchy peanut butter. I'm not a huge crunchy peanut butter fan, but this one may turn me into a convert. The texture of the nuts aren't as intimidating as some of the other crunchy peanut butters on the market, and the peanuts are perfectly roasted. I think I may even prefer it over the Smooth.
With so much hype around the Everything Butter, I was definitely intrigued. The texture is much different compared to the other kinds of nut butter—incredibly thick with seeds and pieces of nut. The flavor is surprisingly savory and had me immediately dreaming up charcuterie boards that could pair with such a spread.
Onto the Coffee and Maple peanut butter. Is it weird to compare peanut butter to ice cream? I'm an avid consumer of ice cream, particularly any ice cream that has a mocha flavored base, so this peanut butter immediately had me hooked. It's like having your favorite Frappuccino on a slice of bread. Sounds strange, but I promise, it works.
It's funny that I easily compared their Coffee and Maple flavor to ice cream, because the last flavor I tried was in fact a dessert butter—their Dark Chocolate peanut butter. It's a mix of their Super Crunchy peanut butter and 60% premium dark chocolate, and of course, a dash of sea salt. It's every chocolate peanut butter lover's dream and had me licking the rest off my plate.
I expected to always hate natural peanut butter. I was wrong.
Do you know what's interesting about all of this? I actually never liked natural peanut butter. The peanut butter in my cabinet almost always has a bit of palm oil in it because I just hate dealing with the extra oil and having to stir. Plus, nutritionist after nutritionist has told me that a small amount of sugar and palm oil in peanut butter won't have a huge effect on my health if I portion it out properly, so I figured I would go with what my taste buds like.
But now, as I taste what I am happy to back as "the world's best peanut butter," maybe my view on natural peanut butter has shifted. Peanut butter does not need a lot of sweetness in it to be tasty.
Fix & Fogg leaned hard into having the best roasted peanuts for their jars of peanut butter, and the quality of each product shows. Plus, their inventive flavors make them stand out among the rest—like their Everything Butter and the Coffee and Maple. Sugar does not have to always be the added ingredient. Unless, of course, it's dark chocolate. I'm perfectly happy with that add-in.
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