By Sharon Omahen
University of
Georgia

What mom wouldn’t love having an easy way to make peanut
butter sandwiches when the kids and their buddies pile into the
kitchen all at once? University of Georgia scientists have
developed a peanut butter spreader that makes sandwich making a
breeze.

Peanut butter is most widely used in sandwiches. And no one
eats more sandwiches than school-age children.

National surveys show that the average American eats 1,500
peanut butter sandwiches by the time he or she graduates from
high school. That prompted UGA researchers to survey Georgia
school students. School cafeterias, then, were the perfect place
to conduct a survey.

“Since they’re the major consumers, we knew they held the key to
understanding the peanut butter market,” said Stanley Fletcher,
an agricultural economist with the UGA College of Agricultural
and Environmental Sciences.

The cafeteria secret is the blend

Students who buy school lunches eat fewer peanut butter
sandwiches, the survey showed, than those who bring lunches from
home.

But many of them are cafeteria-prepared peanut-butter-and-jelly
sandwiches. UGA CAES food engineer Manjeet Chinnan was surprised
to find out why kids love them so much.

“The school cafeteria workers blend the peanut butter and jelly
together and then make the sandwiches,” Chinnan said. “They do
this to reduce the viscosity of the peanut butter and make it
easier to spread. And the kids love it.”

Either way, making sandwiches for an entire school of students is
very labor-intensive. So the UGA researchers set out to develop
an easier way to mass-produce peanut butter sandwiches.

With funding from Birdsong Peanuts and the Southeastern Peanut
Research Initiative, Chinnan developed a prototype sandwich
maker. It used a large industrial can of peanut butter and was
based on the conveyor-belt production concept.

Second version the charm

“It worked, but it was too cumbersome, and it would take up too
much room in a kitchen,” Chinnan said. “Then (UGA research
technician) Glenn Farrell and I came up with the current
prototype.”

The new sandwich maker is handheld and looks like a bulk tape
dispenser. Peanut butter is loaded into the top of the device and
then dispensed in sheets.

“It works a lot like a toothpaste tube except there’s a slit at
the end instead of a nozzle,” Chinnan said. “There’s a blade
inside that makes the peanut butter come out in sheets.”

Now that the researchers have a model that works well dispensing
peanut butter, they plan to use it to dispense jelly, too.

“We know if it works with peanut butter, it will work with
jelly,” he said.

Next they plan to develop an operational model and promote it to
school cafeterias and restaurants.

“I’d like to see it used in restaurants that serve freshly
prepared sandwiches and possibly in self-serve vending machines,”
Chinnan said. “We still have a couple of quirks to work out. But
that’s why it’s a prototype.”