Reference: Visit websiteThe travel writer Rick Steves once recalled that for his first visit to Europe, in 1973, he packed a big plastic tube with what he knew couldn't be found there: "a swirl of peanut butter and strawberry jam."
But over the last decade, Britain and many other corners of Europe have come around. Perched between the jams and marmalades at Waitrose , a popular British grocery chain, there are now 35 varieties of peanut butter — creamy and chunky, sweet and salty and extra-dark roasted, crammed into jars, squeeze bottles and two-pound tubs.
In cities across the United Kingdom, peanut butter appears in shortbread form at Hawksmoor , a high-end steak chain; in a tart at the Greek chain Gaia , and sandwiched among 20 tiers of chocolate and mascarpone in a viral layer cake at Lavo , an Italian restaurant in affluent Mayfair. Peanut butter — or as Jon Krampner, the author of " Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter ," calls it, the "all-American spread" — has well and truly landed across the Atlantic.
Britain is not the first European nation to take up the sticky baton — the Netherlands outpaces even the United States in peanut butter consumption, according to Mr. Krampner. Yet it is the most recent European country where the product has taken off, with sales skyrocketing in Britain over the last half-decade as it's popped up in brownies, bakes and burger relishes and as a topping for curries and crumpets.
According to a report from Market Data Forecast, European peanut butter sales are growing at an estimated rate of more than 10 percent each year, a market likely to be worth $1.35 billion by 2026. Britain is the "growth engine in the area," the report says.
In 2020, peanut butter outpaced jam, the quintessential British preserve, for the first time in sales. A year earlier, perhaps sensing a shift in tastes, Marmite , the yeasty black spread beloved in Britain for more than a century, introduced a peanut butter-Marmite hybrid.
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