It's nearly forty years since I stumbled into peanut butter making and my little baby is now being advertised on national TV. Whole Earth peanut butter, that's the one.

In the early days of Whole Earth Foods (when it was still Harmony Foods) my brother and I decided that peanut butter had to be one of our product lines. Soon thereafter I spotted a curious looking horizontal stone grinding mill at a used equipment seller's warehouse. It sort of called out to me, as happens. Turns out the stones were marble and it was made for hospital use, from the days when they used to make up ointments and salves in the hospital basement. And it was only £100 so I thought to give it a whirl on some peanuts and if it didn't work then not a lot lost.  

It worked, grinding brilliant peanut butter that was crunchy or smooth depending on how tight the stones were positioned together. I blended three different types of peanut originally, selected for flavour, texture and oil content. At the original Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit we put that mill on the Harmony Foods stall and sold it as fast as we could grind it. The British had never tasted good peanut butter before, the only brand being under-roasted and under-salted with a resultant taste of undercooked beans. Yuk.

We soon had five of those mills grinding away non-stop and I can assure you the next four cost somewhat more than £100 each. But we sold a lot of peanut butter and though I've not been involved with it since 1982 it is satisfying to see it finally hit the big time.