Nutter Butter

Did you know Nutter Butters are no longer shaped like tasty, two-ply bread peanuts? Go ahead, exhale your outrage. We had to.

Here at Snackpot headquarters, there was furious rending of garments and the loud gnashing of teeth. When this guy heard about it, he went on a two-state crime spree that ended with him T-boning two state police cruisers in a stolen El Camino.

Sadly, it’s true. At some point in recent snack history, Nabisco knowingly devolved one of the most distinctive and popular cookie shapes of all time into a ho-hum, two-inch diameter circle. Yes, the ridges are still there, those breaded bumps that suggest the contours of its god, the peanut. But without the hourglass curves, this Nutter is considerably more boring.

That’s not all. A Snackpot confidant and lifelong Nutter Butter eater swears the cookie’s peanut filling is missing some of its sweetness. And she might be right. While the filling’s final taste profile is similar to Butters of yore, the top notes are off and the mouth feel is different. And there’s no way to blame that on an imperfect circle.

What all of these means is that Nutter Butter, the cookie that crumbled into a thousand after school specials, is no longer the cookie of childhood record. In its current incarnation, it needs more filling to have a true profile, to assert itself above the hundreds of other peanut butter-derived snacks on the market. But it hasn’t, and it probably won’t, and we’ll move on to those other hopefuls for our PB fix. Nutter Butter: the shape of things not to come.