Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Compete Against Nutella (And Lose): Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate!


The Good: Tastes fine, Good ingredients, Affordable, Easy to work with
The Bad: Not chocolatey enough, Not great on the nutrition front
The Basics: With a name like Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate, I had higher expectations for the flavor than the product delivered!


Sometimes, a brand becomes so associated with a product that it becomes virtually impossible for other companies to compete. Brand name word association has made Band-Aid the almost universally used term for adhesive medical strips and Nutella's chocolate-flavored spread (reviewed here!) has made it virtually impossible for other companies to produce a similar nut-based chocolate spread. Still, Hormel made a decent attempt with its Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate.

Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is not bad, but it is hardly as chocolatey as those raised on Nutella (or who experience Nutella first) will expect from a spread.

Basics

Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is a flavored nut spread produced by Skippy (Hormel Foods). It seems to be a new peanut butter that is part of their expanding line of flavored peanut butters. Given that I found the Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate on clearance I, suspect that they are finding the market inhospitable for this spread.

Skippy’s Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate comes in the company’s standard 15 oz. plastic jar. The Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is a very dark brown peanut butter. It is very creamy, as one might expect from a peanut butter; this is a smooth peanut butter without chocolate additives. The container comes with an easy to unscrew lid that keeps it fresh use after use!

Ease Of Preparation

Skippy is a peanut butter, so there is not much needed in terms of preparation. Simply unscrew the plastic cap, tear off the foil safety seal below that and consume! It is that easy. Unlike most natural peanut butters, the Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate does not separate and, thus, does not require one to stir it up before use.

Taste

Opening the container of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate, the peanut butter emits a smell strongly and distinctly of peanut butter. The scent is all nutty, without any trace of chocolate in its bouquet.

On the tongue, Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is smooth, dry, and tastes like a nutty, less-sweet version of peanut butter than the standard Skippy peanut butter. Instead, this tastes like a very average peanut butter, with a dry flavor similar to the aftertaste of baking chocolate. The chocolate flavor never truly asserts itself and it is not a powerful flavor at all.

The flavor of the Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is easily sublimated to anything sweet connected with it. In a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate loses on the taste front to virtually any jelly overwhelms the peanut butter. The Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate has not been added to anything I have tried and resulted in a greater chocolate flavor being brought out.

The aftertaste of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is only slightly dry, but it lingers in the mouth for about ten minutes.

Nutrition

Obviously, as a nut spread, Skippy cannot do much about the lack of nutrition with their peanut butter. Given that the peanut butter is made largely of roasted peanuts, palm oil, and salt, this is not an overly nutritious product. There is nothing unrecognizable in this
peanut butter, so it lives up to its promise of being all natural.

Still, the Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is not the best product in the world on the nutrition front. A 2 Tbsp serving of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate has 200 calories, 130 of which are from fat. Those 14 grams of fat represent 22% of one’s RDA of fat. Unsurprisingly, one serving is 4% of your RDA of carbohydrates, though there are 6 grams of protein in this spread. There are 120 mg of sodium in the peanut butter. It is not a food to try to live off of, even with its smatterings of Iron, Vitamin E, and Niacin.

This Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is not marked as kosher or vegan compliant. Oddly, it includes no allergy warnings.

Storage/Cleanup

Keep the peanut butter sealed and it still has a fairly limited shelf life. The container we bought in mid-November would have expired by December 14, 2015, had I not eaten it all up! This spread does not seem to denature with time at all.

As a product made mostly of nuts, the Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is very easy to clean up. Simply washing it off with hot water helps clean off anything this gets on. Hot water is recommended because of the oils in it.

Overall

The Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter With Dark Chocolate is not chocolatey enough to thrill, but it is a fairly good peanut butter . . . for a creamy one.

For other food spreads reviews, please check out my reviews of:
Jif Creamy Cashew Butter
PB Crave Coco Bananas Peanut Butter
Jif Mocha Cappuccino Flavored Hazelnut Spread

5/10

For other food reviews, please visit my Food Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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