Two jars on the shelf at Bhatbhateni. Same size, same loud "100% NATURAL" sticker on the front, and one is Rs 150 cheaper. The front of a jar is advertising. The back of the jar is the contract. Most people in Nepal buy peanut butter without ever turning it around, and that is exactly what the cheap stuff is counting on.
Turning it around takes about thirty seconds once you know what you are looking at. Here is how to do it.
The order of the list is the whole story
Under Nepali labelling rules, and under basically every food labelling rule in the world, ingredients are printed in descending order by weight. The first ingredient is the biggest part of the jar. The last one is the smallest.
So a label that reads Peanuts and nothing else is a jar of ground peanuts. A label that reads Peanuts, sugar, salt, stabiliser (GMS) is mostly peanuts with a bit of sugar and salt. And a label that reads Peanuts, sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, salt is telling you that there is more sugar in that jar than there is added fat, and more added fat than salt. That is a dessert spread with a peanut flavour.
The one-second version of this test: how far down the list do you have to read before you hit something that is not a peanut? The further, the better. If the second word is an oil or a sugar, put it back.
Length matters too. Peanut butter is not a complicated food. Peanuts are already about half oil by weight, which means a grinder and some patience are genuinely all you need. Every extra line on the ingredients panel is there to make the product cheaper, shelf-stabler, or sweeter, and usually the first one.
The words that should make you pause
Manufacturers do not write "we replaced some of your peanuts with cheaper fat." They write one of these instead.
Palm oil, palmolein, palm kernel oil, vegetable fat. The most common filler in mass-market peanut butter. It is cheap, it is solid at room temperature, and it holds the paste together so the jar looks perfect on a hot shelf in Kalimati in June. Nothing about it improves the peanut butter.
Hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Same job as palm oil, done chemically. Partially hydrogenated oils are the trans-fat category that health authorities worldwide have spent two decades pushing out of the food supply. If you see the word "hydrogenated" on a peanut butter label, that is the end of the evaluation.
Soybean oil, sunflower oil, canola oil, cottonseed oil, "edible vegetable oil." That last phrase is the one to be suspicious of, because it is deliberately non-specific. A manufacturer that names its oil is telling you something. One that writes "edible vegetable oil" has reserved the right to use whatever was cheapest that month.
Sugar, and sugar wearing a hat. Invert sugar syrup, glucose syrup, liquid glucose, corn syrup, dextrose, maltodextrin, molasses. Splitting the sweetener across two or three names is an old trick, because it pushes each one further down the weight-ordered list and keeps "sugar" from sitting at number two.
Starch, maltodextrin, soy flour, "peanut solids." Bulking agents. They add weight and texture for less money than peanuts cost. In peanut butter there is no good reason for them to be in there.
Artificial preservatives and artificial flavour. Roasted peanuts ground into a paste are low-moisture and naturally quite shelf-stable. Something that needs a preservative usually has water or cheap fat in it that needs protecting.
For what it is worth, none of that list appears anywhere in our range. No palm oil, no seed oils, no hydrogenated fat, no artificial preservatives, in any variety or size. You can read the full ingredient breakdown for each one on our products page, and every independent lab report we hold is public at /reports, with the tested value, the safe range and a scan of the original document.
Emulsifiers: not villains, but they should be named
Here is where a lot of "clean eating" content on the internet goes off the rails, so let us be straight about it.
GMS, glycerol monostearate, sometimes printed as E471, is an emulsifier and stabiliser. Its job is to keep the peanut oil from separating out and floating to the top, which is what gives American-style smooth peanut butter that uniform, spreadable, never-oily texture people grew up with. It is a permitted additive, it is used in a huge range of foods, and it is not palm oil and not a hydrogenated fat. Calling it dangerous would be scaremongering.
But it does change what you are eating, and you have a right to know it is in there. That is the actual standard worth holding a brand to: not "zero additives," which almost nothing meets, but is everything in the jar printed on the jar.
Our own range splits exactly along that line, and we would rather say so plainly than hide behind a wellness adjective. All Natural is 100% peanuts, nothing else, no sugar, no salt, no stabiliser. Classic American is peanuts, sugar, salt and GMS, because that combination is what makes it taste like the peanut butter most people are actually looking for. Chocolate is the Classic American base with about 10% real cocoa. All of it is on the label. If you want the longer comparison of what "natural" actually means next to the familiar stuff, we wrote that up in natural vs regular peanut butter.
Two things on the jar that most shoppers read backwards
Oil on top is good news. People in Nepal see a layer of oil sitting on their peanut butter and assume the jar has gone bad or been cheated. It is the reverse. Separation means nobody added anything to prevent it. Stir it back in with a knife, keep the jar upside down in the cupboard between uses, and it stays mixed longer. If a jar never separates, something in it is doing that work.
The nutrition panel cross-checks the ingredients panel. Flip to the per-100 g column. Unsweetened peanut butter lands around 4 to 6 g of sugar per 100 g, all of it naturally from the peanuts. Once you are seeing double-digit sugar per 100 g, the ingredients list will confirm it. Protein is the other tell: peanuts are naturally high in protein, so a jar that has been heavily diluted with oil and sugar will show a noticeably lower protein figure than one that has not.
The 30-second checklist
Next time you are standing in a kirana pasal or a department store aisle, in order:
- Turn the jar around. Ignore the front label entirely.
- Count the ingredients. One to four is a good sign. Eight is a formulation.
- Read the first two. Peanuts should be first. Whatever is second tells you what kind of product this really is.
- Scan for the red-flag words: palm, hydrogenated, vegetable oil, any second sweetener, starch, maltodextrin.
- Check sugar per 100 g on the nutrition panel against what the ingredients list implied.
- Look for a DFTQC licence number and a batch code. A batch code means the manufacturer can trace that specific jar. If you want to know why that matters more than any marketing claim, see what DFTQC certification means.
That is it. You do not need a nutrition degree, just the habit of flipping the jar over.
We built our own labels around the assumption that people would do exactly this, which is also why every Lokah jar carries a QR code on it. Scan it and you land on /verify with that batch's ingredient sourcing and production details, and a link through to any lab report we have published for that product, not a generic brand page. We are DFTQC certified and we also get our products independently tested at a private Nepal-standard lab, though we will be straight with you: we do not test every single batch, because at our size the cost of that is not realistic. Everything we do have is up there, which is rather the point, since it means we cannot quietly change anything.