A peanut butter jar tells you almost nothing. It is an opaque tub with a printed label, and standing in a kirana pasal you have no way to know whether what is inside was ground last month or fourteen months ago, whether the peanuts were stored well, or whether anybody ever put a sample of it in front of a lab.
You are asked to trust the label. That is the whole transaction.
We decided early that "trust us" is a bad answer on its own, so here is the honest version of what we actually do. Lokah Foods is DFTQC certified, the government's food safety approval in Nepal, and on top of that we send our products for independent testing at a private Nepal-standard lab as well. Every result we get back, whichever lab it came from, goes up publicly at /reports. We are not going to pretend we test every single jar that leaves the factory. We do not, that is not realistic at our current scale, and a brand claiming otherwise without showing you the paperwork is not being straight with you either. What we can promise is that everything we do test, you can see.
Two labs, not one certificate framed on a wall
A lot of food marketing in Nepal leans on a single certificate. A company sends one sample to a lab once, gets a clean result, puts "lab tested" on the pack, and coasts on that document for years. Technically true, practically thin, because peanuts are an agricultural product and the lot we buy in Mangsir is not the lot we buy in Jestha.
So we split the job between two kinds of testing. DFTQC certification covers the facility and the product against the government's own food safety standard, the baseline every legal food business in Nepal is supposed to meet. Alongside that, we also get independent tests run at a private Nepal-standard lab, the same kind of testing a hotel or an auditor would ask to see. Two different institutions looking at the same product, not one and done.
What a lab actually looks for in peanut butter
People hear "lab tested" and picture a vague seal of approval. It is more specific and more interesting than that. Roughly three categories:
Is anything growing in it? Microbial testing looks for bacterial and mould contamination, the kind that comes from unhygienic handling, wet equipment, or packing a warm product into a sealed jar. Peanut butter is naturally hostile to microbes because it has very little free water, which is exactly why it keeps for months without preservatives. But "naturally hostile" is a reason to expect a clean result, not a reason to skip the test.
Aflatoxin. This is the honest one, and the reason we would rather write about testing than about how creamy our product is. Aflatoxin is a toxin produced by Aspergillus moulds, and groundnuts are one of the crops it likes most, particularly when they have been stored warm and humid. That describes a good part of Nepal for a good part of the year. It is not a scare story invented by marketers and it is not something you can taste or see. It is measured in parts per billion and it has a legal limit, which means the only useful thing a peanut butter company can tell you is a measured number with that limit printed beside it. Any brand that tells you aflatoxin is "not an issue" for their product without showing you a figure is telling you they have not looked.
Composition and quality. This covers the parameters that describe what the product actually is rather than whether it is unsafe: fat, moisture, and indicators of whether the oil has started to go rancid. Rancidity is the ordinary failure mode of real peanut butter, since there is nothing in an all-natural jar to stop oxidation except time, temperature, and honest best-before dating. Composition testing is also what keeps the label true. If a pack claims a certain fat or protein profile, this is where that claim either holds or does not.
We are not going to publish fabricated pass percentages or invent a number here. Go read the actual tables.
The reports are public, not in a drawer
lokah.com.np/reports is a plain list of the lab reports we have, newest first. Each one shows the batch number, the date, the name of the issuing agency, whether it came from a government or private lab, the pack size and the number of samples tested, then a table of results.
The table has four columns and the third one is the one that matters. Parameter, tested value, safe range, test method. A number on its own is theatre. "Aflatoxin: 2.1" means nothing to a normal person until you can see the permitted limit next to it, and the method used to arrive at it. Below the table we also put up scans of the original lab document, so you are not only reading our transcription of it.
We publish these whether or not anyone reads them. Most weeks nobody does. That is fine. The point of a public record is that it is checkable, not that it is popular.
The QR code on the jar, and how to use it
Every pack has a QR code and a printed batch code, and this part does apply to every single jar, not just the ones we have lab data for. Two ways in:
- Scan it. Open your phone camera, point it at the QR code on the label, tap the link. No app needed. It opens that batch's page directly.
- Type it. Go to /verify and enter the batch code printed on the side or bottom of the pack. Case does not matter, the form uppercases it for you.
The codes look like A260108PBAR01. They are not random: the block after the leading letter is the production date, then a product code, then which run of the day it was. So the code itself already tells us, internally, exactly which grind it came from.
What you get back is a verified-or-not answer and then the detail behind it:
- Ingredient traceability. For each ingredient in that batch, where it was purchased, the supplier's city, the purchase date, and the supplier's own batch code where we have it. There are also photographs of the actual ingredient as it arrived at the factory. You can tap through them.
- Batch details. Product and variant, pack size, production date, and best before date, calculated from the production date rather than stamped optimistically.
- Lab reports. Where we have a published report for that product, a link straight through to it.
If you want to see it working before you buy anything, the /verify page has an example code with a "Try it" button. Press it and you will see exactly what a real scan shows.
And if a code does not resolve, that is information too. Check the characters first, because 0 and O and 1 and I all look identical in small print on a curved label. If it genuinely does not come up, email us at lfrcnp@gmail.com with a photo. We would rather hear about a pack that does not verify than not hear about it.
Why we do it this way
Partly because we manufacture our own product at our own factory in Pepsicola rather than outsourcing it, so there is no third party between us and the result. If something is wrong, it is our problem, and traceability is much easier to promise when you are the only link in the chain.
Partly because certification and lab testing answer different questions, and they get conflated constantly in Nepali food marketing. DFTQC certification says the facility and the product were approved against the government standard. A lab report from a private Nepal-standard lab says what our testers actually found in a specific sample. We would rather give you both than lean on whichever one sounds better in a sentence.
And partly because the alternative is asking you to take our word for things that are easy to lie about. We do not use palm oil or seed oils, we do not use artificial preservatives or hydrogenated fats, and our All Natural is nothing but peanuts. Our Classic American and Chocolate contain sugar, salt and GMS as a stabiliser, which is printed on the label because that is where it belongs. If you want to get good at spotting which of those claims a brand is quietly avoiding, we wrote a whole post on reading a peanut butter label.
Most peanut butter in Nepal is sold on a picture of a peanut and a nice font. Ours is sold on a jar you can scan while standing in the shop, and a set of real lab results you can go read before you have paid us anything.