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50 free Peanut Butter trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
48 free Peanut butter trivia questions with answers. Peanut butter has a stranger history than the jar lets on. George Washington Carver did not invent it, the Aztecs beat everyone to it, the Dutch were banned from calling it butter, and the man who stopped the oil separating went on to invent chunky. This quiz covers the whole spread: the patents and health-institute origins, the brand battles between Jif, Skippy and Peter Pan, the PB&J, the fluffernutter and the Elvis sandwich, and the candy that grew out of it, from Reese's Penny Cups to Nutter Butter. There is peanut science too: why a peanut is a legume and grows underground, how the USDA screens for aflatoxin, and why Israeli babies who eat Bamba have fewer allergies. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a lunchbox crowd; the rest will test a food historian. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia's peanut and peanut butter articles, and each question shows its citation.
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Q 01Peanut butter is a paste of ground peanuts. How have the peanuts usually been prepared first?
Dry roasting
John Harvey Kellogg's 1898 version boiled the nuts instead, which is one reason his paste never caught on.
Q 02Botanically, a peanut is not a nut at all. What is it?
A legume
It grows in pods underground like a pea, which is why Linnaeus named the species hypogaea, Greek for 'under the earth'.
Q 03Which ancient civilisations are credited with the earliest form of peanut butter?
The Aztecs and Incas
Sixteenth-century Aztecs reportedly used the paste as a remedy for aching gums.
Q 04Marcellus Gilmore Edson, granted the first peanut butter patent in 1884, was from which city?
Montreal
His application described a product with 'a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment', which he stiffened with sugar.
Q 05Which cereal pioneer patented a peanut-based 'alimentary product' in 1898 for patients who could not chew?
John Harvey Kellogg
Because it debuted at expensive health institutes, peanut butter began life as food for the wealthy.
Q 06Which famous Tuskegee scientist is often wrongly credited with inventing peanut butter?
George Washington Carver
By the time his 1916 bulletin '105 Ways of Preparing' the peanut appeared, the spread had already been patented several times over.
Q 07Who invented the 1922 process that stopped oil separating in peanut butter, later licensed to Peter Pan?
Joseph L. Rosefield
He licensed it to Peter Pan in 1928, then launched Skippy himself in 1932 and went on to invent chunky-style.
Q 08Which peanut butter brand, launched in 1932, is credited with the first 'chunky' style?
Skippy
The brand name was borrowed, over its creator's objections, from Percy Crosby's 'Skippy' comic strip; the lawsuits ran into the 2000s.
Q 09Jif, launched in 1955, tasted sweeter than rivals because its recipe added sugar and what?
Molasses
Jif became America's biggest peanut butter brand in 1981 and is now made by Smucker's at the world's largest peanut butter plant, in Lexington, Kentucky.
Q 10When the American spread reached Dutch shops in 1948 it could not legally use its usual name. Why?
'Butter' was dairy-only
The Dutch call it pindakaas, 'peanut cheese', a name inherited from a sliceable peanut block eaten in colonial Suriname.
Q 11Which two US states are the major peanut-producing states?
Georgia and Texas
More than half of the American crop ends up as the spread.
Q 12What date is National Peanut Butter Day in the United States?
January 24
April 2 is the separate, unofficial National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day.
Q 13By roughly how much did US peanut butter sales rise in March 2020 over the previous March?
75%
Its long shelf life and protein content made it a pantry staple, just as it had been in the Great Depression.
Which peanut-butter puffed corn snack holds a quarter of Israel's snack market and is tied to low peanut-allergy rates?
Q 21A 'fluffernutter' pairs peanut butter with what other spread?
Marshmallow creme
The name was dreamed up by an advertising agency in 1960; the sandwich itself dates to a World War I recipe.
Q 22The fluffernutter has been proposed as an official state food of which New England state?
Massachusetts
Marshmallow creme was invented in Somerville and Melrose, both in the state, which explains the regional loyalty.
Q 23H. B. Reese created his peanut butter cups in 1928 after being let go by which chocolate company?
Hershey
He lost his job managing Hershey's Round Barn in 1919 and used Hershey chocolate in his own candy from the start.
Bamba
Osem launched it in 1964 and chose the name because it sounded like baby talk; the peanut butter is imported from Argentina.
Q 15A 100-gram serving of smooth peanut butter supplies roughly how many calories?
About 600
Around half of it is fat, mostly the monounsaturated oleic acid also found in olive oil.
Q 16The children's snack 'ants on a log' is a celery stick filled with peanut butter and topped with what?
Raisins
The groove in the celery is the log, and the raisins lined up along the top are the ants.
Q 17The first published mention of PB&J, in 1901, suggested serving it how?
As a tea sandwich
Julia Davis Chandler proposed it in the Boston Cooking School Magazine; it only went mass-market once its main ingredient was mass-produced.
Q 18Which company patented the sealed crustless PB&J in 1999 and sold frozen Uncrustables from 2000?
Smucker's
The profits helped it buy the Jif brand from Procter & Gamble, giving one company the largest peanut butter and largest jelly brands.
Q 19'Goober Grape', a single jar with stripes of peanut butter and grape jelly, went on sale in which year?
1968
'Goober' is a Southern word for peanut that came into American English via the Kikongo language.
Q 20Elvis's 'Fool's Gold Loaf' was a hollowed loaf filled with peanut butter, jelly and what?
Bacon
His better-known peanut butter and banana sandwich is now simply called 'the Elvis'.
Q 24What was the official early name of Reese's peanut butter candy, reflecting its price?
Penny Cups
Reese's six sons merged the company into Hershey in 1963, and by 1969 the cups were Hershey's top seller.
Q 25Reese's Pieces became hugely popular after appearing in which 1982 film?
E.T.
Unlike the cups, the candy-shelled Pieces contain no chocolate at all.
Q 26Nutter Butter, the peanut-shaped cookie, was launched by Nabisco in which year?
1969
When the Red Cross stopped handing them out at Georgia blood drives in 1995, donations reportedly fell by 20,000 pints.
Q 27The criss-cross fork pattern on peanut butter cookies first appeared in recipes in which decade?
The 1930s
Peanut butter itself only became a listed cookie ingredient in the early 1930s; the fork marks were popularised by Pillsbury.
Q 28Peter Pan peanut butter took its name in 1928 from a character created by which author?
J. M. Barrie
Before that the same product had flopped under the names Dainty and Delicia; the switch made it a best seller.
Q 29Hormel-owned Skippy was the best-selling peanut butter in which country in the 2010s?
China
Hormel bought Skippy from Unilever in 2013 and pulled it from Canada in 2017; worldwide it trailed only Jif.
Q 30Which cartoonist fought for decades against the peanut butter maker that borrowed his comic strip's name in 1932?
Percy Crosby
Crosby's strip became a novel, a radio serial and an Oscar-winning 1931 film before the peanut butter appeared in 1932.