A few weeks ago, I got an email from a friend wanting to connect me with friends of hers who’d just started a business making peanut butter, Nut Butter Nation. I’m not a fan of peanut butter, but I was interested to talk to one of Nashville’s many culinary entrepreneurs. If you haven’t noticed, there’s not just a growth spurt in restaurants and food trucks, but in well-crafted and “artisanal” food products.
Certainly, Nashville has a history of successful food products; Goo Goo Clusters and Christie Cookies come to mind, as well as relative newcomer, Olive and Sinclair. The numerous commissaries around town — including The Cook’s Kitchen and Mesa Komal — offer space for entrepreneurs to get started with their businesses. Add a population that’s clearly eager (and hungry!) for new and interesting foods, and it all makes Nashville a great place to get started.
That’s just a portion of what Grant Ellis, “head grinder” at Nut Butter Nation and I discussed. They are currently operating out of The Cook’s Kitchen but are expanding so rapidly (they just started in earnest in April of this year) that they’re already planning their own dedicated facility. A big part of the success, Ellis says, was the community of entrepreneurs here who are so willing to help out. He mentioned that Dan Stephenson of Dan’s Gourmet Mac & Cheese, Ryan Pruitt of Frothy Monkey and Will Newman of Edley’s Bar-B-Que were particularly helpful in guiding the way through the difficult questions about packaging, suppliers, partnerships, and just about any other question he had when getting started and being very supportive overall.
However, none of that would have helped all that much if it weren’t for a key factor: The Nut Butter Nation peanut butter is good.
Ellis spent a long time perfecting recipes and it shows. This is not your average peanut butter. Even though I really don’t like peanut butter, I decided to give the products a try. They currently have two flavors: brown sugar cinnamon and honey vanilla. The brown sugar cinnamon was too much like a peanut dessert for me (please note that was a good thing according to my husband and daughter, who loved it), but I didn’t dislike it (as I do big-name peanut butters). The surprise for me was the honey vanilla. I liked it. I could definitely taste the honey and vanilla, which were blended in at just the right ratio for me. It is sweet, but not too sweet. Both peanut butters also were clearly devoid of preservatives and additives, which is a key reason that they taste so good.
So, if you see Nut Butter Nation (available at Batch Nashville, Green Door Gourmet and Marché, among other places locally), pick some up and try it out. As I mentioned, they are expanding rapidly and should be adding many more retail locations and flavors very soon. Ellis told me that flavors on the horizon include sea salt and caramel peanut butter as well as chocolate. He eventually plans to have four to six flavors in regular stock as well as seasonal flavors. Though almonds are featured in the company's logo, Ellis plans to focus on peanut butters in the near future.
Keep up with what they’ve got going on via their website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
