A thousand welcomes, lovely lover of peanut butter.
I’ll start with a little story about how I came to be doing this:
Twenty years ago I was sailing in the Bay of Islands (I like that sailing), and rowed across to an American yacht for breakfast. Brad made some toast, asked what I’d like on it, and pulled an old jar of American peanut butter out of a locker. On the label it said, in big letters “Health Style”. Now I, like any strapping kiwi lad, knew that peanut butter was pretty damned healthy already, so I was intrigued to know what they’d done to it to make it better.
What these clever yanks had done was to reduce the amount of sugar they added! I was stunned. In those days no kiwi peanut butter contained sugar, but I could see the writing on the wall…
‘Mark my words’ I said to anyone who would listen: ‘The day will come when peanut butter will be loaded with sugar.’
And so it has come to pass. I discovered sugar in my favourite peanut butter back in 2007. I switched brands, but very soon they were all at it. I rang Pam’s 0800 number once, to be told that their market surveys showed customers preferred it that way!
And then I became aware that just about all the peanut butter in our supermarkets was being made in China, and that they were not only adding sugar, but they were chucking emulsifiers, antioxidants and litres of unspecified hydrogenated oils in there as well.
I was on the point of ringing the bastards again when I hatched my plan. I bought a ten kilo bag of peanuts and started roasting. And grinding. And it was YUMMY. I fed it to my twelve year old son and he liked it. And his mates liked it too – one even bought some with his pocket money.
So that, in a peanut shell, is what got me going. I started off roasting in the garage and grinding in the kitchen but gave that away after a year for a dark and gloomy corner of a disused freezing works at Wakatu industrial Estate here in Nelson. People like you kept buying it, and before we knew where we were, we sending it off by the pallet and needed to move again.
We are now very happily settled in a brand new building with shiny white walls, a nut store the size of Te Papa and hand basins with taps that turn on when you wave your hands underneath them.
There are eight of us here, Corey, Paul and Chris making your peanut butter, Lee, Amanda, Chris and me organising jars, shops, money and stuff, and Craig and Russell dealing with machines and trucks and boxes that need to be moved about
We really like it here. Craig and Amanda like it so much they had a baby. The office is full of toys. The lunch room is full of Vogels and peanut butter. AND we all live in Nelson!
So thank you from the bottom of my heart. It is you, your enthusiasm, your encouragement and your remarkable support that has made this possible, and I look forward to keeping both of us in really good peanut butter for the rest of our days.
