I recently finished up a jar of peanut butter. I did a pretty thorough job of scraping out the last bits, but there’s always some left. That got me thinking. So I weighted the jar (with the last little bit of peanut butter), then gave it a good washing and let it dry, and weighed it again. The difference was 12 grams – that’s how much peanut butter I left. What does that add up to over a year, across the USA?
Americans consume about a billion pounds of peanut butter per year. How much of that is delivered in jars for home use? That number isn’t available, so let’s just say half, or 500 million pounds. The typical peanut butter jar is one pound, but some are larger. Call it 400 million jars sold. This is a pretty rough estimate, but real data is hard to come by.
Assuming 2 tablespoons per sandwich (suggested serving size), that works out to 147 million sandwiches!