Who Invented Peanut Butter?

Many people think that George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. Although Carver played a crucial role in popularizing peanuts as a viable crop for Black farmers, the concept of grinding the nut into a spreadable paste predates his work.

Peanuts are native to South America, where they were domesticated and cultivated as a nutrient-packed crop at least 3,800 years ago. In pre-Hispanic Bolivia and Peru, raw peanuts were ground into a sticky paste, often mixed with cocoa.  

Spanish explorers brought peanuts back to Europe in the 16th century, but they were dismissed as a strange weed that fruited underground. A century later, Portuguese sailors brought peanuts from Brazil to Africa, where they became a staple of West African cooking.  

In the United States, peanuts were brought by enslaved Africans and are grown mostly in Southern states like Georgia, Alabama and Florida.

According to most food historians, John Harvey Kellogg was the first to patent a process for making nut butters in 1895. In the 19th century, Kellogg and his brother, Will, ran a popular sanitarium—a type of health spa—in Battle Creek, Michigan, called the Western Health Reform Institute. The Kellogg brothers, members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, were strict vegetarians and promoted whole grains and nuts as superfoods capable of treating most illnesses.  

Kellogg's 1895 patent was for a food compound, which was like a 19th-century energy bar—a blend of oily nut butter, powdery nutmeal and starchy grains like wheat, barley and oats. It was meant to be eaten by “anemic and emaciated persons.” 

According to the patent, Kellogg's peanut butter was made by boiling raw peanuts for four to six hours, letting them dry, then passing them between heavy rollers. The process separated ground peanuts into two products: a “fine and comparatively dry and nearly white nutmeal” and a “moist, pasty, adhesive and brown” substance, which Kellogg called “butter or paste.” 

Kellogg’s 1895 peanut butter recipe—notably boiling the peanuts for hours before grinding—would likely result in a bland, mushy paste, not the rich, roasted flavor of modern peanut butter. Another strike against Kellogg’s patent was that it didn’t promote peanut butter as its own spreadable food, but as one ingredient in a health food compound. 

Some scholars argue that a snack food maker named George Bayle in St. Louis was selling peanut butter before Kellogg, as early as 1894. In the early 1900s, the label of Bayle’s Acorn brand claimed that the company was “The Originators of Peanut Butter.” However, since Bayle never patented his creation, most historians give Kellogg credit for the invention. Kellogg would become a vocal promoter of peanut butter and sold it under his Sanitas Nut Food Company as early as 1897.  

Peanut butter was also one of the American foods first showcased at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, along with ice cream cones, cotton candy and Jell-O.

Carver was an accomplished agricultural scientist who dedicated himself to helping Black sharecroppers in the post-Reconstruction South. Much of the land in the South had been stripped of nutrients by repeated plantings of cotton. Carver promoted alternative crops like sweet potatoes and peanuts to rebuild soil health.  

As part of his research, Carver came up with hundreds of potential uses for peanuts—including shampoo, shaving cream and glue—on top of its many culinary applications. In 1916, Carver published a pamphlet called “How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it For Human Consumption.” It includes a recipe for peanut butter.