Teddie's going bigtime

I don't remember when I discovered Teddie Peanut Brother. Although Teddie has been around for 100 years now, I didn't grow up with it. We were a Peter Pan PB household, and we ate plenty of it. 

Peter Pan was by no means the most popular brand back then. That was Skippy. But buying Peter Pan was definitely in keeping with parental preference for the oddball. Prince Spaghetti? Fuggedaboutit! We ate Mueller's. Why eat B&M baked beans when you could have Friends instead? Not that I liked baked beans in any way, shape, or form, but this was a particularly galling choice because B&M can labels could be turned in for mission money. Fortunately, the tea brand that worked was Tetley, so I did have an occasional Tetley box lid to contribute to saving pagan babies. 

I don't know if these brand choices were economically or personal idiosyncracy driven, but we also used Ipana toothpaste (not Crest or Colgate), played Easy Money rather than Monopoly, and Keyword rather than Scrabble. 

Of course, whenever we complained about some family weirdness in comparison to what "everyone else" could buy or do, my parents were quick to respond with "but you're not everyone else." Which was abundantly clear to the Rogers kids, that's for sure.

Today, Jif is the number one peanut butter brand in terms of market share, but Jif, the choice of "choosy mothers," didn't factor into my early childhood, other than for this one event. I remember that I was in third grade, so eight years old, and it was a cool early spring day and I was out of school, sick. But not so sick that I couldn't be out riding my bike around our empty street. I'm thinking this must have been when we'd been quarantined with chicken pox and, while I had pretty much recovered, the quarantine fatwa still applied to our house. (My sister Kath had what the doctor - who, by the way, made house calls - characterized as the worst case of chicken pox he'd ever seen.)

Anyway, while I was bicycling around, I met a man going door to door delivering small samples of Jif. My mother took at sample, but we did not convert. (I googled, and there was a nationwide launch of Jif in 1958, which foots with the chicken pox on our house.)

I didn't stay brand loyal to Peter Pan, but as an adult went over to Skippy and once in while to Jif. 

I did stay totally loyal to peanut brother, however. And somewhere along the line, 30+ years ago, I discovered a local brand, Teddie, and that was it for me.

Peanut brother is a staple chez moi, and you can pretty much guarantee that at any given time, there'll be a couple of jars in my cabinet. (Just checked, and I currently have four jars, once of which is pictured here.) 

Teddie is not, of course, to everyone's liking. (My sister Trish is not a fan.) For one thing, it's not homogenized, so you have to stir it up to get the oil mixed in, and you sometimes end up with dry clumps that are difficult to spread. And Teddie isn't sweet, either. Only two ingredients, peanuts and salt. No sugar or anything else added.

Teddie was the brainchild of Michael Hintlian, an Armenian immigrant who opened a candy shop in Boston's Quincy Market in 1925, and a few years later started making peanut butter. 

Now, 100 years after he started his company, that simple food, which he called Teddie Peanut Butter — it’s named after the son of an early employee — has fed generations of New Englanders, developed a cult following among foodies who love that its “all natural” ingredients list consists of just peanuts and salt, and become so in-demand that his grandsons are overseeing a hesitant expansion outside of the region.

After a century as a New England secret, Teddie, our Teddie, is going national.

Over the past two years — driven by an extremely loud insistence from New Englanders who have settled elsewhere in the country — that familiar glass jar with a green lid has made its way onto the shelves of Whole Foods and Publix.

 

It’s a cautious expansion, said Jamie Hintlian, the CEO who is part of the third generation to run the company (his son also works there). If anything, the sales team has found hundreds of ways to say no to retailers who want to carry the brand, Hintlian said, wary of straying too far from its core. (Source: Boston Globe)

I hope that Teddie's is successful in not "straying to far from its core." This is a brand that inspires local loyalty - tees, caps, hoodies, tattoos - near-equivalent to that of Harley-Davidson. And if the comments on The Globe article are any indication, the biggest fear among the faithful is that Teddie's will replace their glass jars with plastic. They did this for a short while a couple of years back, and it was not well-received, but if Teddie's starts shipping all over the country, there'll be pressure to switch to plastic to lower shipping costs. There's also concern that the company will be pressured to add sugar, as some folks/some regions prefer their PB on the sweet side. Not us tough New Englanders, but years ago my sister worked for a company that did marketing research for consumer products companies. I don't remember which specific brand of PB it was, but the formula for peanut butter used by this brand added more sugar than elsewhere to product sold in the South.

There is absolutely no reason to change the Teddie's recipe. The Wircutter, which does product reviews for the New York Times, has twice rated Teddie as the top creamy peanut butter (including a couple of months ago). My preference is crunchy, but I'm sure if they rated the crunchies, Teddie's would again be top of the heap. 

I wish Teddie's a successul nationwide rollout. I love seeing local companies make good. A few years ago, visting friends in Dallas, I was delighted to find Worcester's-own Polar Soda in the grocery store. 

As long as Teddie's keeps the same formula, and keeps its wonderous peanut butter under glass, I'll be happy.