Big Spoon Roasters: The Complete Guide to Fresh-Roasted Nut Butter

Peanut butter is one of those foods industrial production taught us to stop thinking about. The jar is supposed to be uniform, shelf-stable and essentially interchangeable. Big Spoon Roasters starts from a different place. Nuts have varieties and farms. Roasting changes aroma. Freshness changes flavor. Salt can sharpen a nut without turning the whole thing salty. A spoonful made from recently roasted peanuts can taste surprisingly far removed from the smooth brown paste many of us grew up with.

Coffee went through this shift years ago. Chocolate is still going through it. Big Spoon has spent the better part of fifteen years making the case that nut butter belongs in the same conversation.

That is why the word Roasters is in the name.

The peanut butter that started in Zimbabwe

Big Spoon Roasters traces its beginning to a much earlier jar.

Around the turn of the millennium, co-founder Mark Overbay was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zimbabwe. He learned the local practice of roasting groundnuts and grinding them with stones into a coarse paste. Mark, already an enthusiastic peanut-butter eater, started playing with the idea. He added honey, salt and coconut oil to the freshly ground peanuts.

The result stayed with him.

A decade later, Mark met Megan Lynam. They shared an interest in food made carefully and in the idea that a food business could pay attention to flavor, agriculture, labor and environmental impact at the same time. Megan had her own practical relationship with nut butter. As a pescatarian endurance athlete with a dairy intolerance, she had been making nut-based energy bars because the commercial options she found did not work particularly well for her.

The two ideas met in the same kitchen.

They developed recipes and packaging through 2010 and sold their first Big Spoon Roasters jars and bars at a bicycle race in January 2011. The name came from Mark's father, Gary, whose habit of taking oversized spoonfuls of peanut butter straight from the jar had earned him the family nickname "Big Spoon."

It is an unusually appropriate name for a company whose products are difficult to treat as mere sandwich ingredients.

Why roasting changes the conversation

A conventional jar of peanut butter is engineered around consistency. The consumer expects the jar bought in March to behave like the jar bought in November. Industrial processing is very good at delivering that result.

Big Spoon is trying to preserve more of the character that appears before the product becomes standardized.

The company sources nuts and other ingredients, develops its own formulas, and roasts, grinds and blends small batches in-house in North Carolina. A recipe with only a few ingredients can still take months to finalize because roast level, nut variety, sweetness, salt and texture all interact.

Freshly roasted nuts carry volatile aromatic compounds that fade over time. Roasting also drives browning reactions that create many of the flavors we describe as toasted, nutty and caramelized. Grind those nuts while the roast is fresh and the difference shows up in the finished butter.

This is easiest to understand by tasting the simplest jars first. Big Spoon's flagship peanut and almond butters are not blank bases waiting for flavorings. The nuts themselves are expected to do most of the work.

The peanuts are chosen as an ingredient, not a commodity

Big Spoon's main peanut is a high-oleic Runner grown in North Carolina.

"High-oleic" refers to its fatty-acid profile. Compared with conventional peanuts, a larger share of the fat is oleic acid. That composition also makes the nuts more resistant to oxidation, which can help preserve flavor.

The company has tested different peanuts over the years and built its flagship recipes around the Runner for its roasted flavor and texture.

Then there is the Crunchy Peanut Butter.

Instead of making the base and the crunchy pieces from the same peanut, Big Spoon uses the high-oleic Runner for the ground butter and Hubs Virginia XL peanuts for the crunch. The recipe is finished with sorghum syrup from Tennessee and Jacobsen sea salt. The contrast is obvious in the jar: creamy peanut butter underneath, genuinely large crisp pieces throughout.

Sorghum deserves a moment here. The syrup is made from the juice of sweet sorghum cane and has a darker, earthier character than maple syrup. It has deep roots in Southern cooking, so its appearance in a North Carolina peanut butter feels less like a novelty ingredient than a regional accent.

Mission almonds make almond butter taste different

Almond butter can be remarkably anonymous. Many producers use the same familiar commercial varieties, roast them lightly and grind them into something whose strongest characteristic is simply "almond."

Big Spoon uses heirloom Mission almonds.

The Mission variety dates to a chance seedling discovered in Texas in the late nineteenth century. Its kernels are shorter and darker than the Nonpareil almonds that dominate the visual image of California almonds. Big Spoon favors Mission for a practical reason: the flavor is concentrated, and the nut responds well to a longer roast.

The company buys its Mission almonds from a family farm operation in California that is certified for pollinator-friendly practices. The almonds are steam pasteurized rather than treated with propylene oxide, and Big Spoon leaves the skins on when milling.

If you want to understand the variety without much distraction, start with the Almond Butter with Wildflower Honey. The ingredient list is unusually short: Mission almonds, raw organic wildflower honey and Jacobsen sea salt.

The honey is present, but the almond still owns the jar.

Why the oil separates

Open a natural nut butter and find oil sitting on top and there is an understandable impulse to think something has gone wrong.

Nothing has.

Nut oils naturally separate from ground solids over time. Big Spoon does not use palm oil or hydrogenated oil to lock the mixture into a permanently uniform texture. Some recipes contain small amounts of coconut oil for texture, but that is part of the recipe rather than a no-stir stabilization system.

The practical consequence is simple: stir the jar.

Big Spoon recommends working a sturdy knife, spoon or fork down to the bottom, making a few channels through the dense portion, then gradually folding the oil back through the solids until the texture is even. This also redistributes spices, salt and other ingredients that may have settled.

The company recommends storing its jars in a cool, dry place away from direct sunlight. Refrigeration is optional rather than required. For jars eaten slowly, storing them upside down or flipping them periodically can make the next stirring session easier.

Natural separation is slightly less convenient than a no-stir supermarket jar. It is also a useful clue to how the product was formulated.

The supporting ingredients are unusually specific

A glance through Big Spoon's ingredient sourcing reads more like a small specialty-food shop than a nut-butter factory.

The company uses Jacobsen sea salt from Oregon. Its organic pecans come from family orchards in Texas and Mexico. Cashews are sourced from growers in Vietnam. Maple syrup comes from Vermont. Sorghum comes from a family producer in Tennessee. Organic wildflower honey is sourced from the Sundarbans region of India. Pistachios come from California.

This does two things.

First, it gives the recipes more character. A named syrup, salt or nut variety can contribute flavor in ways a generic commodity ingredient does not.

Second, it makes the product easier to understand. Big Spoon publishes considerably more sourcing detail than is normal for the category. The company describes where ingredients come from, how they are processed and what standards it uses when evaluating suppliers.

That transparency has become part of the business itself. In January 2026, Big Spoon announced that it had become a Certified B Corporation after fifteen years as an independent, founder-led company.

The original jar: Peanut Butter with Wildflower Honey

The Peanut Butter with Wildflower Honey is where we would begin if someone wanted Big Spoon reduced to one spoonful.

It is the clearest descendant of the peanut butter Mark made in Zimbabwe: roasted high-oleic peanuts, raw organic wildflower honey, Jacobsen sea salt and a little organic virgin coconut oil.

The honey does not turn it into dessert. The salt is there to sharpen the roast. The coconut oil softens the texture. What remains is recognizably peanut butter, except the roasted-peanut flavor is far more forward than it is in many supermarket jars.

Put it on toast, apple slices or a PB&J, but taste a spoonful plain first. This is the reference point for the rest of the range.

Chai Spice began as a wedding favor

The Chai Spice Peanut & Almond Butter has a useful origin story because it explains how Big Spoon approaches flavored nut butter.

Mark and Megan created it for their 2012 wedding. Mark combined his obsession with nuts with Megan's love of masala chai, and guests received jars as wedding favors. The response was strong enough that it joined the permanent range.

The spice mixture includes cardamom, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, vanilla and black pepper. The base combines peanuts and Mission almonds, with honey, cane sugar and sea salt rounding it out.

It tastes like a nut butter with spices in it rather than a sweet spread flavored to resemble chai.

Apples, oatmeal and toast are the obvious places to start. It is also very good with dark chocolate.

Pistachio Crunch is the jar that explains the fun

The Pistachio Crunch Almond Butter began as a limited batch and ended up as one of Big Spoon's signature products.

Mission almond butter forms the base. Whole California pistachios supply the crunch. Maple syrup and sea salt sit in the background.

The Good Food Foundation gave Pistachio Crunch a Good Food Award in 2023. It later appeared among the foundation's 2025 "15 Years of Good Food Awards" South-region selections.

Awards aside, it is one of the easiest jars to understand immediately. Pistachio gets expensive quickly, so many pistachio-flavored products economize on the actual nut. Here, the pistachios are visible and textural. The almond base keeps the spread from becoming cloyingly rich.

Use it on toast, pair it with a tart preserve, put it on a cheese board, or eat the pistachio pieces straight from the spoon.

Crunchy Peanut Butter is a texture project

If your loyalty is to classic crunchy peanut butter, the Crunchy Peanut Butter is the more revealing upgrade.

The Runner peanuts make the creamy body. Virginia XL peanuts are folded in for size and snap. Sorghum and sea salt give it a Southern accent without pulling it far away from the category.

This is one of those products where the technical idea is instantly legible when you eat it. The crunchy pieces are not an afterthought left over from the same grind. They were selected because they crunch well.

A PB&J made with it has enough texture that the sandwich stops feeling soft from crust to crust.

Lemon Coconut became Lemon Cookie

The jar we carry as Lemon Coconut Cashew Butter has since been renamed Lemon Cookie Cashew & Coconut Butter by Big Spoon. The company said the recipe stayed the same when it changed the name in 2024.

Cashew provides a mellow base for real lemon, coconut nectar, toasted coconut, coconut oil and flaky sea salt. The toasted coconut gives it little crisp interruptions, while the lemon keeps the whole thing brighter than the phrase "cashew butter" might suggest.

Yogurt and fruit are especially good with it. It can also be used as part of a cookie filling or simply spread on a plain biscuit when you want dessert to require almost no work.

Vanilla Caramel without the dairy caramel

The Vanilla Caramel Almond & Cashew Butter builds caramel-like flavor out of roasted nuts, maple syrup, coconut nectar, vanilla and sea salt.

Mission almonds and cashews give it a deep roasted base, while the two sweeteners and vanilla push that base toward toffee.

This is one of the sweeter-feeling jars even though nuts remain the foundation. It works particularly well with pears, apples, oatmeal and dark chocolate.

Carrot Cake took a Good Food Award in 2026

The Carrot Cake Almond & Walnut Butter is built from Mission almonds and English walnuts with maple syrup, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, coconut oil and sea salt.

The idea could have gone badly. "Carrot cake" on a jar can easily become code for a sugary cinnamon spread.

Instead, the walnuts give the recipe a slightly tannic depth and the spices stay recognizable. There is no need for the butter to imitate frosting. It is trying to catch the toasted nuts and warm spice of the cake.

In 2026, the Good Food Foundation named it a Pantry category winner after blind tasting and a broader evaluation of how winning producers approach sourcing and responsibility.

Try it in overnight oats with tart yogurt and grated carrot, which is one of those producer serving suggestions worth stealing.

Lum Lum is where nut butter becomes dinner

The strangest jar in the range may also be the one that most clearly proves Big Spoon is not confined to breakfast.

Lum Lum Thai Curry Peanut & Cashew Butter began as one of the company's tiny R&D releases. The recipe takes its cue from Thai red curry.

The nut base combines high-oleic peanuts and cashews, with larger Virginia peanuts for crunch. Coconut nectar adds sweetness. The curry mixture brings galangal, lemongrass, red chile, coriander, paprika, lime peel, garlic and shallot.

The Good Food Foundation gave Lum Lum a Good Food Award in 2024, making it Big Spoon's second consecutive Pantry-category win after Pistachio Crunch.

Think of it less as something for toast and more as a ready-made cooking ingredient. Thin it for a dipping sauce. Toss it with noodles. Spoon it next to roasted vegetables. Put it on cucumber or avocado. Peanut and curry already have a long culinary relationship; the jar moves the seasoning and the nut base into the same container.

Big Spoon says proceeds from Lum Lum support Carolina Tiger Rescue and its educational work connected with habitat pressure and palm oil.

Bourbon Pecan brings the South back into the jar

Bourbon Pecan Peanut Butter combines roasted peanuts with pecans, Vermont maple syrup, bourbon whiskey, cocoa butter, applewood-smoked salt and Jacobsen sea salt.

The bourbon is a real ingredient rather than bourbon-style flavoring. Big Spoon says the alcohol is cooked away during production and the finished food falls below the 0.5 percent alcohol-by-volume threshold it cites for food products.

The smoke and pecan make this an easy jar for fall breakfasts, apples and oatmeal. It also belongs on crackers or toast points when drinks are being poured.

Current availability changes, so check the Big Spoon Roasters collection for the live assortment.

Big Spoon's limited batches are part of the point

One reason the permanent lineup feels unusually inventive is that the company has a testing mechanism built into the business.

Limited Batches run seasonally. Smaller R&D batches may consist of only a few hundred jars. Popular experiments can return, and some graduate to the permanent range.

Pistachio Crunch came through that path. Carrot Cake did too. Lum Lum started even farther out in R&D.

This allows Big Spoon to make ideas that a large national nut-butter company would struggle to justify. A giant factory wants long production runs, predictable ingredients and huge markets. A small roastery can ask whether Thai curry belongs in a jar of peanut and cashew butter, make a few hundred jars, and find out.

Sometimes the answer is yes.

Why Big Spoon costs more than supermarket nut butter

There is no mystery about the basic economics.

Big Spoon uses specific nuts, whole spices, real sweeteners and named specialty ingredients. It roasts and produces in-house in comparatively small batches. It uses glass jars. The company says it pays certified living wages and provides employee benefits. It does not formulate around the cheapest stabilizing fats or outsource production to a co-packer.

None of that means every person needs a premium jar of nut butter.

If peanut butter is primarily a low-cost calorie source in your kitchen, mass-market peanut butter performs that job very efficiently.

Big Spoon becomes interesting when you care about the flavor of the nuts themselves, when a jar can function as a pantry ingredient, or when breakfast is one of the places where you are willing to buy something genuinely better.

The fairest comparison is probably not between Big Spoon and the cheapest peanut butter on a supermarket shelf. It is between Big Spoon and other specialty foods made from unusually good raw materials in small batches.

A jar lasts through quite a few breakfasts.

How we use it at home

Nut butter does not need a recipe to justify its existence, but a good jar can do more than sit beside a loaf of bread.

Toast and fruit. Start simple. Good bread, nut butter, sliced pear, apple, banana or berries.

Yogurt and oats. Stir a spoonful into plain yogurt, overnight oats or hot oatmeal. Carrot Cake, Chai Spice and Lemon Coconut are especially good here.

PB&J with better preserves. A tart jam gives rich nut butter some friction. Raspberry, sour cherry, blackberry and plum are usually more interesting than an excessively sweet preserve.

Dark chocolate. Vanilla Caramel, Pistachio Crunch and Chai Spice all work with bittersweet chocolate. A square of chocolate dragged through the jar is sufficient technique.

Savory sauces. Lum Lum is the obvious choice, but plain peanut or almond butter can also become a sauce with citrus, vinegar, chile, soy sauce or another salty seasoning.

Cheese and snack boards. Pistachio Crunch beside an aged cheese, fruit and crackers makes more sense than it has any right to.

Baking. Natural nut butter changes dough texture differently from stabilized peanut butter, so recipes written specifically for natural nut butter are safest. Big Spoon maintains a large recipe archive if you want to go farther than improvisation.

Which Big Spoon Roasters jar should you start with?

If you want the clearest introduction to the company, buy the flagship Peanut Butter with Wildflower Honey.

If almonds are your thing, the Almond Butter with Wildflower Honey gives the Mission variety the most room to speak.

For texture, choose Pistachio Crunch or Crunchy Peanut Butter.

For something sweet-leaning without becoming candy, Vanilla Caramel is difficult to argue with.

For breakfast spice, Chai Spice or Carrot Cake.

For the jar least likely to be mistaken for ordinary nut butter, pick Lum Lum Thai Curry.

And if you are standing in front of the shelf and still cannot decide, this is a rare category where choosing by mood works pretty well.

A small roastery hiding in plain sight

Big Spoon Roasters began with a person learning how different peanut butter could taste when the peanuts had just been roasted and ground.

The company has grown considerably since that first bicycle race, but the original observation still explains the jars better than any marketing language does.

Start with good nuts. Roast them carefully. Grind them while the flavor is alive. Add only what earns a place.

Then hand somebody a spoon.

Explore the current Big Spoon Roasters collection at The Ambrosian Pantry.