When it comes to food mashups, chocolate and peanut butter is a pretty reliably delicious combo. Hell, Reese’s built an entire brand on the immaculate synergy of these flavors. Good on Jif for thinking outside the peanut shell by bringing together creamy peanut butter and luscious chocolate to create the new Jif Peanut Butter & Chocolate flavored spread. If the Venn diagram of your passion for peanut butter and your passion for Nutella is essentially just a circle, this stuff is ostensibly for you. But is new Jif chocolate peanut butter as flawless as it sounds? We tasted it to find out.
Let me start by saying that we love Jif peanut butter. In fact, we think it’s the best peanut butter at the grocery store, in part because it has such a bold, roasty peanut flavor. But it turns out all that peanutty goodness doesn’t leave a lot of room for chocolatey goodness.
Pros: This product is called Jif Peanut Butter & Chocolate spread, so it stands to reason that it should taste more like peanut butter than chocolate. And that is certainly the case. It tastes mostly like an extra sweet, very desserty peanut butter and, hey, that’s great for peanut butter lovers, right? Some of the folks at Mythical HQ who tried it really liked it, including Mythical Chef Josh Scherer, and he’s a good dude! Also, Jif is definitely positioning this as an alternative to Nutella, but it apparently has 50% less sugar than “the leading hazelnut spread with cocoa”—so there’s that!
Cons: Unfortunately, most of the tasters weren’t quite as impressed. The spread is a deep brown, much like Nutella, so I really, really wanted it to taste more chocolatey. The only place I really got cocoa was on the finish, and it mostly just contributed a subtle bitterness. My colleague Jordan Myrick called it “forgettable,” and I can see a lot of people agreeing.
Howdy! I’m Gwynedd, Sporked’s managing editor. I live in Los Angeles and have access to the best tacos the U.S. has to offer—but I’m a sucker for a crunchy Old El Paso taco night every now and then. I’ve been at Sporked since 2022 and I’m still searching frozen mozzarella sticks that can hold a candle to restaurant sticks.
Why you should trust me: I’ve been a journalist for 20 years (yikes), a consumer of food for 40-plus years, and I’m truly hard pressed to think of foods I don’t like (or that I can’t tolerate at the very least). Oh and one time I cooked my way through Guy Fieri’s cookbook and wrote about the journey through Flavortown.
What I buy every week: Trader Joe’s Original Savory Thins. Fat free plain yogurt (usually Fage or Nancy’s). Honeycrisp apples. Sweet cream coffee creamer for my at-home Americanos. A frozen cauliflower crust pizza and some jarred mushrooms to top it with. Old El Paso Stand ‘N Stuff taco shells and Gardein Ground Be’f, even though I think “be’f” is a nightmarish contraction.
Favorite ranking: Stouffer’s frozen dinners. I don’t own a microwave (I get my cancers the old fashioned way!), so I love taste testing things that I don’t really buy to eat at home.
Least favorite ranking: Soy sauce. Don’t get me wrong, I love soy sauce—but consuming that much sodium in one sitting is probably illegal in some countries. Our frozen enchilada taste test was a close second; the smell of microwaved corn tortillas still haunts me.
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Gwynedd Stuart
Vinz Karl
Jordan Myrick
Justine Sterling
