From nut to butter – steps, ingredients and processing equipment

Nuts make up to 90% of nut butter, accompanied by salt, vegetable oil, dextrose and corn syrup to improve taste and texture. Nut butter production starts with harvest, which is helped by portable mechanical pickers. Harvested nuts undergo a process called shelling, passing through a series of rollers to crack them, followed by screens, blowers, magnets, and destoners to remove the shells.

Once they reach the factory, nuts are dry-roasted. Nuts are then quickly passed to the next piece of nut butter processing equipment – coolers, where they are cooled down to 30°C. Passing the cooled nuts through a gravity separator removes foreign materials before blanching them, in case the chosen nuts have skin. In contrast, the remains are removed by passing them further through the blancher in a continuous stream. Finally, the nuts are processed in a grinder, from where it goes to a stainless steel hopper, which is both a mixing and storage point.

All the butters to go nuts for

Smooth or crunchy, sweetened or natural, added to savory or sweet meals, nut butter and nut pastes offer a wide range of products. The most popular choices are peanut, almond, cashew, walnut and pecan butter or pastes. Some of these products are rich in fiber, protein, and fatty acids as well as vitamins and minerals, which makes them an ideal addition to any meal.

The environmental impact of nut butter production