Pic's Peanut Butter Crunchy 1 kg

Product Information

My Mum and Auntie had made a bit of peanut butter when I was little. So I bought a few kilos of peanuts, roasted them in the oven, and squished them up with a bit of salt, blowing up my cheap modern blender in the process.

This roaster is the secret to the freshness and delicious flavour of Pic’s Peanut Butter. The trip through the roaster takes 15–20 minutes, and while they’re there, the peanuts are roasted at 150°C. Once they’re perfectly roasted, the peanuts cool down and rest a wee bit before bouncing out the end of the roaster. But bigger was still to come. In 2016, a South Australian engineering company heard that Pic’s was looking to scale production up again, so they got in touch to say they could build us a machine that could roast 1 tonne of peanuts an hour — and use the same amount as power as the one we already had. When you look at the huge machine that is Matilda, it’s hard to imagine that she’s replaced Pic’s trusty concrete mixer in just 15 years. Who knows what we’ll be using to do our roasting in another 15 years? I made a roaster out of a concrete mixer and bought a benchtop grinder and a tonne of peanuts from Australia and got to work. There's a video HEREif you're interested.These lines are automated; the jars get filled four at a time, then travel along to another machine, which attaches their starry lids. (Pic originally chose to put a star on our jar lids to encourage people to reuse them, as he figured it would look good in people’s pantries.) When the bags come in, they’re emptied into a hopper, which then drops the peanuts onto a conveyor belt that takes them up into our purpose-built oven — Roasting Matilda. Named by our very own Picsters, Matilda is 12 metres long and she’s been getting our peanuts toasty warm since 2016. As the peanuts come down the conveyor, any bits of skin or peanut dust that’s come loose during the roasting process is collected in a large box. At Pic’s we hate wasting anything, so this goes to local farms for animal feed.

It was disgusting. Full of sugar. There was a Freephone number on the jar and I rang it for a moan, to be told, "Most people prefer it with sugar, sir." The concrete mixer continued its roasting duty until Pic had upped his production and moved into his first factory in Elms Street in Stoke. From the concrete mixer, Pic upgraded to a 50-kilogram drum roaster that could be powered by electricity, gas or coal . . . Pic chose electricity. Doing the roasting ourselves is what sets us apart from other peanut butter companies, who import their peanuts already roasted. By buying in blanched but unroasted peanuts, we get to control exactly how much roasting our precious peanuts get so that every jar of Pic’s you buy should taste pretty similar to the one you’ve just finished. If you're a first-time visitor, you'll be thinking we're pretty flash. And you'd be right, but my goodness we've come a long way in a very short time. Other than add some salt, that’s all we do. We don’t add crunchy pieces to make the crunchy more crunchy and we don’t add any oil to make the smooth smoother. Speaking of salt, this is the point at which it gets added if we’re making a salted peanut butter.

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Theother benefit of roasting the nuts ourselves is that it gives our products a longer shelf life than peanut butters made with nuts that have already been tasted when they arrive in the country. And our roasted peanuts taste really great, too! Ever since Pic first put a batch of peanuts in his oven at home, we’ve been keen on roasting our own peanuts. Roasting the peanuts gives them a lovely flavour and a crunchier texture, and while some peanut processors roast their nuts in oil, ours are dry-roasted by their good selves with nothing added. The peanuts then go for a bit of a ride through some see-through tubing down into the hopper and grinder room. As the name suggests, this room houses the hoppers that feed the peanuts into the grinders. Each hopper holds 4 tonnes of peanuts.

The deal was done, and we set about trying to find a name for this new machine that was about to become our pride and joy, the centrepiece of our factory. Running competitions to name things can be a risky business, but thankfully we didn’t end up with a roaster called Roasty McRoastface. After a bit of trial and error – and a batch of burnt peanuts that resulted in the fire service being called by his neighbours – Pic eventually got the hang of using it to roast his peanuts and was soon able to produce 60 jars in a morning. We add just 0.5 percent salt to our peanut butter, and we get our salt from Dominion Salt, New Zealand’s own salt-refining company. Its salt is extracted from seawater at Lake Grassmere, on the Marlborough coast just 165 kilometres from Pic’s factory, and at Mount Maunganui.

The great debate: Smooth or crunchy?

Alongside our factory housing the three main production lines, we have a second factory. There are big windows in the wall separating them so even though some of what goes on in factory two can be top-secret, people can always have a peep and see what’s happening in there! This is where we make our almond butter, and our Vogel’s Big Mix.In there, we still use an actual concrete mixer to blend some of our products — hey, why mess with perfection, right?