Joseph Louis Rosefield (18 Dec 1882 - 8 Nov 1958) was a

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food businessman who invented modern, nonseparating

peanut butter Peanut butter is a food paste or spread made from ground, dry-roasted peanuts. It commonly contains additional ingredients that modify the taste or texture, such as salt, sweeteners, or emulsifiers. Peanut butter is consumed in many countri ...

in 1922 – 1923. His family business, the Rosefield Packing Company, was based in

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. His new production process was licensed to another company to make

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peanut butter in 1923. Rosefield Packing later marketed

Skippy peanut butter Skippy is an American brand of peanut butter spread manufactured in the United States and China. First sold in 1932, Skippy is currently manufactured by Hormel, Hormel Foods, which bought the brand from Unilever in 2013. It is the best selling bra ...

in 1932; both brands are still sold today. It also introduced cylindrical "wide-mouth" jars for peanut butter in 1935. Peanut butter then became a vast food industry. Among other roles, Rosefield Packing provided emergency supplies of peanut butter to

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during

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. Rosefield's family sold Rosefield Packing and the Skippy brand to

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in 1955. Forms of peanut butter were already popular before Rosefield's innovation. The problem was that the oil separated from the peanut grit and did not keep. Rosefield's patented homogenization solution was to partially hydrogenate the peanut oil to make it more miscible with the peanuts. (In other words, he added

vegetable shortening Shortening is any fat that is a solid at room temperature and used to make crumbly pastry and other food products. Although butter is solid at room temperature and is frequently used in making pastry, the term ''shortening'' seldom refers to b ...

to his recipe.) This also made it possible to churn the peanut butter to a creamy consistency. His company promised a one-year shelf life for the product and claimed that it tasted better and was less sticky than previous formulas.

References

* Peanuts: ''The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea'', by Andrew F. Smith, 2002. Chicago: University of Illinois Press ().
History of Skippy
at the Skippy peanut butter web site. Businesspeople from California 1882 births 1958 deaths 20th-century American businesspeople {{US-business-bio-1880s-stub