People are weirdly passionate about peanut butter. Spreading 'smooth' on your morning toast can instantly outrage a flatmate, and many a workplace has been brought to a standstill by a heated 'crunchy vs smooth' debate.
Some think a person's PB preference says so much about them, that they require the question to be answered on Tinder/Hinge/their dating app of choice before a romantic connection can go any further.
For decades, it's been a high-stakes situation of one or the other, but not anymore.
Pic's have released 'smunchy' peanut butter - that's smooth and crunchy - promising the best of both worlds for all the fence-sitters out there.
I confess, I am one of them.
I always liked smooth as a fussy child who lived largely on chicken nuggets and never wanted to challenge my palate. Now that I'm older, I can appreciate the texture and intrigue crunchy brings, but I still find it a bit much.
Smunchy is legitimately made for me, and having been gifted a jar to try in advance, I can promise you, it slaps.
The new offering was inspired by a 10 year-old peanut butter lover called Maggie Mellors who wrote a letter to Pic himself insisting 'smunchy' PB would bring "double the yuminess" to Kiwis. Maggie had already been mixing smooth and crunchy together at home with the help of her dad, and suggested Pic's should do the same.
Makes sense to me, Maggie!
Of course, I'm just one gal, and I know I will have already incurred the wrath of many a crunchy-lover just by writing this article.
To get another opinion, I asked my flatmate, who is both French, and a chef, so he really should know what he's talking about when it comes to food. He also only had his first taste of peanut butter a few years back in Australia, so he doesn't have the same unusually intense emotional attachment most of us have to PB.
He said it was "pas mal" (not bad) and "had a nice balance", which means it essentially does what it says on the tin (jar). Translated into Kiwi, this is basically a glowing review.
You may have spent all this time thinking that crunchy would be the clear winner when it came to the battle of the PBs, but it's a closer race than expected.
In the last three years, 54% of Pic’s Peanut Butter sales in NZ were of the crunchy kind. Across the ditch in Aussie, it was the exact opposite – 54% of sales were smooth.
With just a little tweak of the settings on the nut grinder, a new opponent has entered the game. Pic's Smunchy Peanut Butter will be available online and at Peanut Butter World in Nelson from today, and 50 cents from every jar gets donated to Maggie's chosen charity, Kids Can.
