Six jars on the shelf. Three varieties, each in creamy and crunchy, and if you have never eaten Lokah before, the front of the label does not really tell you which one you want.
So here is the honest version, written by the people who grind it.
The first thing to understand is that you are making two separate decisions, not one. Decision one is the variety, which is about sugar and what the peanut butter is for. Decision two is creamy or crunchy, which is only about texture and has nothing to do with ingredients. Get the first one right and the second one is a coin flip you can make on preference alone.
All Natural: peanuts, full stop
What is in it: peanuts. That is the entire ingredient list. No sugar, no salt, no oil, no stabiliser, no preservative.
What it actually tastes like: roasted peanut, savoury, with a slightly bitter edge at the back of the tongue that sugar normally covers up. The first spoon surprises people who grew up on sweetened spreads, because it tastes like food rather than like a dessert. It is also noticeably thicker and drier than a stabilised spread, and the oil will float to the top of the jar. That separation is not a defect, it is what ground peanuts do when there is nothing in there holding the oil down. Stir it back in with a proper knife and store the jar upside down between uses.
Who should actually buy it: anyone eating peanut butter as a protein and fat source rather than as a treat. Gym-goers and anyone tracking macros, because the label has one line and no hidden sugar to account for. Anyone managing sugar intake, including people watching blood sugar on a doctor's advice. And anyone who cooks with it, which is the use people underrate most. In a smoothie, a satay-style sauce, a peanut chutney, laddu, or any baking, sugar in the peanut butter fights whatever else you are putting in, and you lose control of the recipe. Unsweetened gives you pure peanut flavour and you sweeten to taste yourself. We wrote up a few ways to actually use it in a Nepali kitchen if that is your plan.
The tradeoff, stated plainly: it is stiffer in a cold Kathmandu January, it separates, it costs a little more per jar than Classic, and children who are used to sweet spreads often will not touch it at first.
All Natural Peanut Butter - Creamy
100% peanuts, unsweetened. The one to buy for protein, for cooking, and for cutting sugar.
From Rs 285 · Shop now
Classic American: the jar that actually gets finished
What is in it: peanuts, sugar, salt, and GMS (glycerol monostearate), a stabiliser that keeps the oil from separating. Four things, all printed on the label. We are not going to call this one "nothing added" because it is not, and you can read the back of the jar yourself.
What it actually tastes like: the familiar American-style peanut butter taste most people in Nepal already have a reference point for. Sweet but not dessert-sweet, salted enough to round out the peanut, and smooth and soft straight from the cupboard because the GMS is holding everything in suspension. It spreads cold on soft pau without tearing the bread, which sounds minor until you have tried to spread All Natural on a slice of white bread in winter.
Who should actually buy it: families. This is the everyday household jar, the one that goes on toast before school and gets eaten with a spoon at 11pm. If you are buying for kids who currently eat sweetened peanut butter, this is the honest middle option, and it is a real upgrade on most of what is on the shelf, because it contains no palm oil, no seed oils, no hydrogenated fat and no artificial preservatives. That is the line we hold across the entire range. If you want to know why that matters more than the health claims printed on the front of a jar, we broke down how to read a peanut butter label separately.
It is also the cheapest of the three, which matters when a jar is disappearing in ten days.
Classic American Peanut Butter - Creamy
Sweetened, salted, stays mixed. The family jar that gets eaten fastest.
From Rs 250 · Shop now
Chocolate: a dessert spread that happens to be mostly peanut
What is in it: the Classic American base, so peanuts, sugar, salt and GMS, plus about 10% real cocoa powder. Real cocoa, not a cocoa-flavoured compound.
What it actually tastes like: peanut first, then cocoa. It is closer to a peanut butter with chocolate in it than a chocolate spread with a hint of peanut, which is the opposite of how most chocolate spreads are built. The cocoa also takes the sweetness somewhere slightly darker and less sugary-flat than a chocolate-hazelnut spread.
Who should actually buy it: treat it as what it is. This is the toast spread, the thing you put on apple or banana slices, the one that makes a kid finish their breakfast, the base for a quick dessert. It is genuinely good, and it is not the jar to buy if your reason for buying peanut butter in the first place was protein and low sugar. Plenty of households keep All Natural for themselves and Chocolate for the children, and that is a perfectly sensible way to run a kitchen.
Chocolate Peanut Butter - Creamy
Classic base plus about 10% real cocoa. The treat jar, for toast, fruit and kids.
From Rs 330 · Shop now
Creamy or crunchy is a completely separate question
Same recipe, same ingredients, same price. Crunchy just has peanut pieces left in it. So decide this on how you eat it, not on nutrition, because there is no nutritional difference worth discussing.
Pick creamy if you are going to blend or mix it into anything: smoothies and protein shakes, sauces, batters, dressings, ice cream bases. Peanut pieces get chopped up by a blender anyway, so crunchy is wasted there. Creamy also spreads thinner and more evenly, which matters on soft bread and on roti.
Pick crunchy if peanut butter is mostly something you eat directly. On toast, crunchy gives you something to bite through instead of a uniform smear. Off the spoon, straight from the jar, it is better company. It is also better on chiura, where the pieces hold their own against the flattened rice.
If you genuinely cannot decide and you are only buying one jar, buy creamy. It does everything, including being eaten off a spoon. Crunchy is the more enjoyable jar but the less versatile one.
The short version
- You want maximum protein and zero added sugar: All Natural.
- You are cooking, baking, or making shakes: All Natural Creamy.
- You are managing your sugar intake: All Natural.
- You want the familiar sweet peanut butter taste: Classic American.
- One jar for a whole family with kids: Classic American Creamy.
- You want a treat, or something kids will ask for: Chocolate.
- You eat it straight off the spoon or on toast: whichever variety, in crunchy.
- You are only buying one jar and you want it to do everything: All Natural Creamy, and accept the stirring.
Current sizes and pricing for all three are on /products, since prices move and we would rather not print a number here that goes stale.
One last thing worth saying, since it applies whichever jar you pick. We make all of this ourselves in our own factory in Pepsicola, Kathmandu, under DFTQC certification, and our products are also independently tested at a private Nepal-standard lab. We do not test every single batch, because at our current scale the cost of that is not realistic, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. But every report we do have is published in full at /reports, batch number, tested value, safe range and a scan of the original document. And every jar, no exceptions, carries a QR code that pulls up that batch's ingredient traceability at /verify: where each ingredient came from, which supplier, which city, production and best-before dates, with a link through to any lab report published for that product.
If you are still torn between natural and sweetened, the longer argument is in natural vs regular peanut butter. And if you run a shop and this post has you thinking about stocking it rather than eating it, that conversation starts at /bulk.