If a supplier offers you "peanut paste" at a price that looks too good, ask one question: what percentage of it is peanut?
A lot of what gets sold to dessert kitchens in Kathmandu as peanut butter is a compound. Glucose, a hardened vegetable fat, some skim milk powder, a little defatted peanut flour for legitimacy, and a peanut flavour concentrate doing most of the actual work. It's cheap, it never separates, it sits on a shelf for two years. It also tastes like peanut candy rather than roasted peanuts, and it does almost nothing for your texture.
We sell peanut butter to ice cream makers and bakeries, so we're not neutral here. But the production difference is real, and it's worth explaining properly rather than just claiming "ours is better."
What peanut butter actually does in a mix
Peanuts are roughly half fat by weight. So peanut butter is not a flavouring, it's a fat and solids ingredient that happens to taste strongly of peanuts. That distinction is the whole point.
In an ice cream base, that fat does three things at once. It adds richness. It interferes with ice crystal growth, which is why peanut butter ice cream scoops softer than a plain vanilla at the same temperature. And it carries flavour, because most of what your tongue reads as "roasted peanut" is fat-soluble and needs fat to deliver it.
A compound flavour is dosed at 0.1 to 0.5 percent. It brings none of that. You end up with an ice cream that smells like peanut and eats like water. Kitchens then compensate by pushing up cream or adding stabiliser, and by the time they've patched the body back in, the cost gap with real peanut butter has mostly closed anyway.
In baking the difference is even blunter. Peanut butter in a cookie dough contributes fat, protein and fibre, so it changes spread, crumb and chew. Switch from compound flavour to real peanut butter and you will have to pull back other fat and adjust liquid. That's not a problem, that's just formulation work you do once. What you get in return is a cookie that still tastes of peanut after 12 minutes at 180°C. Flavour compounds are volatile. Your kitchen smells incredible and the cookie tastes of nothing, a complaint we've heard more than once.
The separation question, honestly
Here's the part most suppliers skip. Real peanut butter separates. Ground peanuts suspended in their own oil will always want to split, and that's physics, not a defect.
We make three varieties, and for a production kitchen the choice matters more than it does for a home customer:
All Natural is 100% peanuts. Nothing else. It will separate in the pail, so you must stir the whole pail through before you weigh, every time. Skip that and your first scoop is dry paste and your last is oil, and your batches will not match. The upside is total control: no sugar, no salt, so you set your own sweetness and your own sodium, which matters a lot when you're already balancing a sugar curve in a frozen product.
Classic American has peanuts, sugar, salt and GMS (glycerol monostearate), a stabiliser whose entire job is keeping the oil bound to the solids. It stays homogeneous in the pail, so you can weigh straight from the top and get the same composition every time. For a manufacturer who needs repeatable results across a shift, that's usually the more practical ingredient. Just remember it already carries sugar, so you rebalance your recipe when you swap.
Chocolate is the Classic American base with about 10% real cocoa powder. Useful as a ready base for chocolate-peanut swirls and fillings, because it saves you a step and a weighing error.
Across all three we don't use palm oil, seed oils, artificial preservatives or hydrogenated fats. If you want the longer version of why that matters on a label, we wrote it up in natural vs regular peanut butter.
Two practical notes
For a swirl or ribbon, don't pipe peanut butter in straight. At -18°C it sets into a hard waxy band that reads as a fault. Loosen it with glucose or invert syrup first so the ribbon stays plastic in the freezer.
And don't thin peanut butter with water. Water hydrates the protein and solids and the paste seizes into something grainy and stiff. For a pourable peanut sauce or topping, build it into a warm fat or dairy phase, cream or condensed milk, added gradually.
Why buying retail jars is the expensive way to do this
We see this constantly: a bakery buying 20 jars a week off a department store shelf at MRP and putting it into product they sell.
The arithmetic doesn't work. Buying through Lokah's bulk channel, whether that's your local distributor or Lokah directly where none covers your area yet, costs meaningfully less than buying finished jars off a retail shelf, because a retail price already has a full retailer margin built into it. That difference comes straight off your margin on every single unit you sell. तपाईं आफ्नै ingredient मा पसलको markup तिर्दै हुनुहुन्छ, र त्यो पैसा सिधै तपाईंको COGS मा जान्छ.
There's a consistency cost too, and it's the one that bites later. Retail shelf stock is whatever batches that shop happened to receive, in whatever order. Your inputs drift across lots and you have no idea when. Buying by the carton from the factory means you know which batch is in which of your production runs, which means when a customer says "this week's tasted different," you can actually go and look.
Order size and how it gets to you, through your distributor, or Lokah directly if none covers your area yet, is something we'll confirm with you. We'll arrange a taste trial before a first order, because for a formulation buyer tasting the actual paste matters more than any spec sheet. Current sizes and pricing are on products, and the enquiry form is on the bulk page.
Documentation, because you have your own compliance to answer for
If you supply hotels, supermarkets or anyone who runs a vendor audit, you get asked where your ingredients come from. "From a shop in Chabahil" is not an answer.
We're DFTQC certified, we manufacture at our own facility in Pepsicola, Kathmandu, and our products are independently tested at a private Nepal-standard lab on top of that. Every lab report we hold is published at reports: batch number, tested value, safe range, test method, and a scan of the original document. We don't test every single batch, because at our current scale the cost of that isn't realistic, and we'd rather tell you that than imply coverage we don't have. What is published is real and complete, not a curated selection. Every pack carries a QR code that resolves to that batch's ingredient sourcing and production details, with a link through to any lab report published for that product. Record the batch code against your production lot and your traceability is done, no emails, no waiting on a supplier to dig out a certificate. The testing process is written up if you want to see how it works.
That also helps your own label. Because our sub-ingredients are fully disclosed, you can write an honest declaration: peanut butter (peanuts, sugar, salt, glycerol monostearate). With a compound, the best you can put on your pack is "artificial flavour," and for a dessert brand selling on quality, that's a strange thing to print next to the word peanut.
आफैं factory मा बनाउँछौं, ingredient लुकाउँदैनौं. No mystery paste.
If you're formulating something and want to know how our paste behaves before you commit a production run, just write to us at lfrcnp@gmail.com with what you're making. Ice cream base, cookie dough, filling, sauce, they each want a different variety, and we'd rather tell you which one than sell you the wrong pail.