Is Jif Chocolate Peanut Butter the New Nutella?

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. 

jif peanut butter and chocolate spread

New Product!

Jif Peanut Butter & Chocolate Flavored Spread

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.

Rating:

7/10

Sporks


About the Author

Gwynedd Stuart

Gwynedd Stuart, Sporked’s managing editor, is an L.A.-based writer and editor who spends way, way too much time at the grocery store. She’s never met an Old El Paso taco or mozzarella stick she didn’t like.