Every few weeks someone sends us a version of the same message: "बच्चालाई peanut butter दिए हुन्छ?" Usually the jar is already bought and open, the parent is standing in the kitchen, and they want a straight answer rather than a sales pitch.
So here is the straight answer, including the part that costs us a sale. Peanut allergy is real, it can be serious, and if anyone in your family has been diagnosed with one, nothing we make is for them. Everything else below is for the much larger group of people who don't have a peanut allergy but would like to be sensible about it, particularly with a small child.
We make peanut butter. We are not doctors, and nothing here replaces your pediatrician.
Peanut allergy is real, and Nepal is not exempt
In the US, UK and Australia, peanut allergy has been a public conversation for two decades: school lunchbox rules, airline snack policies, EpiPens in handbags. In Nepal that conversation barely exists. Most of us grew up eating bhuteko badam with chiura, sadeko badam at a bhatti, or a paper cone of roasted peanuts at a bus park, without anyone thinking twice.
The quiet here is about awareness, not about biology. Nepali bodies are not built differently. What the silence more likely reflects is under-diagnosis: fewer allergy clinics, limited access to proper testing, and reactions getting explained away as "खानाले बिगार्यो" or an unexplained rash that came and went. A family can go years assuming a child just "doesn't like" badam without knowing why.
Peanut allergy also behaves differently from a food intolerance. It is an immune reaction, not a digestive one, which means it can escalate fast and it does not reliably stay mild just because last time was mild.
What a reaction actually looks like
Reactions usually start within minutes and almost always within about two hours of eating. The commoner, milder signs:
- Hives, welts, or red blotchy skin
- Itching or tingling around the mouth and lips
- Swollen lips or eyelids
- A sudden runny or blocked nose, sneezing
- Stomach pain, nausea, vomiting
The signs that mean stop and go to a hospital now:
- Difficulty breathing, wheezing, or noisy breathing
- Swelling of the tongue or a tight, swollen throat
- A hoarse voice or a repetitive dry cough that won't stop
- Dizziness, fainting, a racing pulse
- In a small child, going pale, floppy, or unresponsive
That second list is anaphylaxis, and it is an emergency. Don't wait to see whether it settles, don't give a home remedy first, and if you are the one reacting, don't drive yourself. Know which hospital near you has an emergency department before you ever need it, which is generally good advice in Kathmandu traffic anyway.
Not every bad reaction is an allergy
This matters, because families sometimes eliminate a whole food group for life based on one confusing evening.
A true allergy is an immune response. It is fast, it is reproducible, and it involves skin, breathing, or circulation, not just the gut.
A digestive reaction is different. Peanut butter is dense and high in fat, and two heaped spoons on an empty stomach can leave an adult feeling heavy and a child with a loose stool. Uncomfortable, not dangerous, and not an allergy.
Choking is the risk people underestimate. For a child under about four, a thick spoonful of stiff peanut butter is a genuine choking hazard, and it has nothing to do with allergies. Thin it with warm water, milk, curd, or mashed banana, or spread it very thinly on roti or bread. This is the more likely thing to go wrong on a first taste, and it is entirely preventable.
If you've had one ambiguous episode, the useful move is to ask a doctor about actual testing rather than deciding on your own. A wrongly assumed lifelong allergy has real costs: a narrower diet, constant anxiety at other people's homes, and a child who grows up afraid of food for no reason.
Introducing peanut butter to a child for the first time
The advice here genuinely changed. For years, parents were told to delay peanuts, sometimes for years. Research over the past decade pushed many pediatric bodies the other way, toward introducing peanut early and then keeping it in the diet regularly once a baby is already eating solid foods, rather than avoiding it.
We are not going to give you an age, a gram amount, or a schedule. That depends on your child, your family's allergy history, and things like whether the child has eczema or a known egg allergy, which are specifically the situations a pediatrician will want to know about before a first peanut exposure. Ask yours. It is a five minute conversation and it is worth more than any article.
What we can offer is the ordinary practical part, about timing and attention rather than medicine:
- Do it at home, in the daytime. Not at a बिहे reception, not in the car on the way to Pokhara, not on a trek. Somewhere you could get to a hospital quickly if you had to.
- Start small and thin it out. A smear, mixed into something the child already eats happily. Never a thick blob straight off the spoon.
- Nothing else new that day. One new food at a time, or you'll have no idea what caused what.
- Not when the child is already unwell. A cold, a stomach upset, or a fever muddies every signal you're watching for.
- Stay around for a couple of hours. Don't start something new and then leave the child with someone who wasn't told.
- Not right before bed. This is the one people get wrong most. You want to be awake and watching, not asleep in the next room.
If it goes fine, it goes fine, and you now have a high-protein food that works with roti, chiura, bananas and a spoon. Most first tastes are uneventful, which is exactly the point of doing them carefully.
If there's a diagnosed allergy in the family, labels are the whole game
For a family already managing a peanut allergy, brand loyalty matters less than reading every label, every time. Formulations change and nobody sends you a notice.
Things worth knowing in the Nepali market specifically:
- "Groundnut" and "badam" are peanut. So is "arachis oil." A label can name peanuts without using the word.
- Unspecified "vegetable oil" tells you nothing. It is one of the reasons we wrote a whole post on reading a peanut butter label, where that phrase does a lot of hiding.
- Cross-contact warnings are inconsistent here. "May contain traces of peanuts" is voluntary in many markets, applied unevenly, and on imported packs it sometimes disappears under a locally applied sticker. The absence of a warning is not evidence of absence. For a diagnosed allergy, treat an unclear label as a no.
- Shared equipment is the usual culprit, not ingredients. Bakery counters, ice cream made on the same machine as a peanut flavour, mithai, and achar or sadeko that uses badam. Some momo achar and chowmein sauces include peanut. Ask, and be prepared for the person answering to genuinely not know.
None of that is paranoia. It is the boring, repetitive work that families managing a real allergy already do, and it deserves better labelling support than Nepal currently gives it.
Where Lokah honestly stands
We are a peanut butter company in Pepsicola, Kathmandu, and peanuts are the only thing our factory handles.
All Natural is 100% peanuts, nothing else. Classic American is peanuts, sugar, salt and GMS, a stabiliser that keeps the oil from separating. Chocolate is that same base with about 10% real cocoa powder. There is no peanut-free Lokah product, there is no peanut-free line or peanut-free shift in our factory, and we are not going to invent one to widen our market. If you or your child has a diagnosed peanut allergy, please don't buy our peanut butter. That isn't legal boilerplate. It's the actual answer.
What we can give you is total clarity about everything else in the jar, which matters more than people expect for families managing other food issues. Across all three varieties there is no palm oil, no soybean, sunflower, canola or cottonseed oil, no artificial preservatives, and no hydrogenated fats. If you're avoiding soy, a jar whose second ingredient is soybean oil is a real problem, and a lot of mass-market peanut butter is exactly that. And if you want the shortest ingredient list we are capable of producing, it's one ingredient long.
All Natural Peanut Butter - Creamy
One ingredient: peanuts. Nothing else to check against a list.
From Rs 285 · Shop now
On the safety paperwork, we'd rather be accurate than impressive. Lokah Foods is DFTQC certified, Nepal's government food safety certification, and our products are also independently tested at a private Nepal-standard lab. We do not test every single production batch, because at our current scale that isn't realistic on cost, and we'd rather say so than let you assume otherwise. Every lab report we do have is published in full at /reports: batch number, tested value, the safe range for that parameter, the test method, and a scan of the original document. What's there is real rather than curated to look complete. There's more detail on how that works in our post on lab testing and traceability.
Separately, every single jar has a QR code, no exceptions. Scan it, or type the batch code at /verify, and you'll see where each ingredient in that batch was sourced, the supplier's city, purchase dates, the production date and the best-before date, plus a link through to any lab report we've published for that product. For a household that reads labels seriously, that's a lot more than a printed ingredient line.
One thing worth separating out, because people conflate them: aflatoxin is not an allergy. It's a toxin produced by moulds that grow on badly stored groundnuts, it affects everyone rather than a sensitive few, and it's one of the parameters our lab reports cover. An allergy is your own immune system reacting to the peanut protein itself, and no amount of testing or certification makes a peanut safe for someone allergic to peanuts.
For most Nepali families, peanut butter is an unremarkable, useful food: protein on a roti, something to get a fussy child to finish breakfast, a jar that lasts the way imported spreads with long additive lists claim to. For a small number of families it is genuinely dangerous, and those families are badly served by brands that fudge the question. If you're the parent in the kitchen with a new jar and a two-year-old, the next step isn't another article. It's a short conversation with your pediatrician, and then a small, thinned, unhurried first taste on a quiet afternoon when you've got nowhere to be.