The Oldest Peanut Butter Brand In America Is Still Around Today

Krema Products Company is the oldest peanut butter brand in America. The year the company began making its spread, Ford introduced its Model T and President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt made the Grand Canyon a national monument. It was 1908, and the company owned by Benton Black began producing what was then a fairly new product in Columbus, Ohio. Peanut butter had been around in earlier forms going back to the ancient Inca, but the first modern version dates to 1890 when a St. Louis physician began grinding peanuts and putting it on bread for his toothless patients.

Although George Washington Carver was a big promoter of peanuts, it's a myth that he invented peanut butter. With that said, he did create several hundred other peanut-related products and helped popularize the legume. Over the years, peanut butter companies came and went, but not Krema. Today, there are two Ohio-based nut butter companies directly related to Black's original — Crazy Richard's and the Krema Nut Company. And how they both managed to survive into the 21st century to become the oldest American peanut butter producers is a story of pluck and perseverance.

By the time Benton Black began making his peanut butter, it hadn't yet begun to be the ubiquitous spread associated with kid's lunches. Even though cookbook author Julia David Chandler had invented the PB&J seven years earlier, in 1901, neither peanut butter nor the sandwich had really caught on yet. It was still considered health food, probably in part to the early health enthusiasts Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother W. K. Kellogg, who patented a steamed peanut butter in 1895. The brothers would, thankfully, make their mark with Corn Flakes (marketed to aid in digestion, not to prevent masturbation as is often believed).

Black's business boomed in Ohio from the 1930s to the 1950s, but with the invention of shelf-stable peanut butter that didn't need to be stirred and lasted much longer — and Black's unwillingness to adulterate his product — his sales slowed. Richard Sonksen bought the Krema Nut Company in 1988 and then sold off the business' Columbus storefront to friends, who still run it under the same name and sell its peanut butter in-house. In 2017, Sonksen's business, under the leadership of his daughter, Kimmi Wernli, rebranded its spread as Crazy Richard's, a Philadelphia brand the company also owned. But it continues to make and sell all-natural peanut butter nearly 120 years after Black began.