OI COBBER! No need to visit NZ ever again ... You can now get your peanut butter in AUSTRALIA Click here

   A thousand welcomes, lovely lover of peanut butter.

I'll start with a little story about how I came to be doing this:

Fifteen 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 about three years ago. 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 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. By the time you read this, we will have moved production out of the family home and into a spanking new-to-me factory from which I look forward to keeping both of us, dear reader, in really good peanut butter for the rest of our days.