Turning a batch into a product

Fix the kill step first

Before anything else: what roast, at what temperature, for how long, and how do you know it is sufficient. If you buy roasted nuts, the equivalent question is what the supplier does and what they will put in writing. Everything else on this page is easier than this and none of it matters if this is unresolved.

Then the formulation, in weights

Nuts, salt, any sweetener, any oil. Weights rather than volumes, because a cup of ground nuts is not a reproducible quantity and somebody other than you will eventually make this. Writing it down also forces the decision about whether you are inside the peanut butter standard of identity or deliberately outside it.

Then the jar, then the label

Net quantity comes from the jar and the fill. The allergen statement comes from the formulation and from what else runs through your equipment. Both move during development, and labels ordered early are labels reprinted.

Decide about separation on purpose

Whether your product separates is a formulation decision with a visible consequence in every jar on a shelf. Makers often leave it unexamined and then field complaints about something they chose. Decide, then say so on the label.

What stops being optional

• A batch code on every jar, tied to the nut lot it came from.
• The supplier and their lot for the nuts, recorded.
• The roast record, with temperature and time, for every batch.
• An allergen and cleaning record for shared equipment.

Decide the shelf life from evidence

Hold jars back from your own batches, store them the way a customer would rather than the way you store inventory, and taste them at the date you intend to print. Oxidation is the clock on this product and it runs faster in a part-used jar, so the date is a prediction worth actually testing.

That retained jar also gives you the fresh reference you need to judge a rancidity complaint, which is much harder to do from memory.

References