— Cynthia Dudak

I used to work at, uh, whole Foods for years, uh, worked on the floor in the actual stores as well, and they typically do have, uh, machines that will grind peanuts into fresh, uh, peanut butter along with almond butter, which is great. I have seen the, at other co-ops, um, around across the country too. So, um, you know, in natural food stores, we'll actually just put in fresh nuts and they will grind them to be able to make them. So if I'm getting fresh, that's typically where I'm getting it from. It's just getting it ground up to be able to, um, you know, get the freshest, uh, flavor out of it. And it's, it's, I know there's nothing else added to it, right? There's no binders or weird chemical stuff. There's no salt or oil added into it. It, because all those, you know, just making peanut butter should just be the peanuts in my opinion. I mean, there are certain times where I'm actually gonna buy, you know, like a regular jar to be able to have it, you know, sit longer. And I usually do those for sauces and stuff like that. But when I'm just looking for, like, especially when my kids are just eating peanut butter on an apple, I'm gonna try to go fresh as often as possible just to be able to get the full flavor, all the nutrients, um, and just make sure that the nuts are good quality nuts that they're putting in there. Um, but you can find that on a multitude of different places. Whole Foods is great at doing that in their bulk section of, I have a local co-op here in Madison that does the same thing, but I've also seen them in Arizona and then Texas as well. As far as co-ops or natural food stores, a lot of their bulk sections do have those. So great way to be able to get your natural almond butters or natural peanut butters as well too. Thanks for the question, Cynthia.