Peanut butter consumers are back

ARLINGTON, Ga. — It’s sunny and warm and dry — and difficult to imagine a more perfect early September day for peanuts in this part of the world where as Arachis hypogaea goes, so goes just about everything else: the economy, the jobs, the pride, the reputation, an entire way of agricultural life.

“Puuuuuurty peanuts,” a farmhand said to Mike Newberry, who smiled as he surveyed fields lush with the dark green, knee-high foliage of peanut plants somebody from the city might mistake for arugula in the rough.

“Yeah,” Newberry said, “they are.”

Nine months ago, a national salmonella outbreak tied to the Peanut Corp. of America processing plant in nearby Blakely, Ga., was blamed for the deaths of nine people nationwide and the illnesses of more than 700.

The outbreak let loose such a flood of bad press on the state peanut industry and threw such a scare into consumers that the head of the Georgia Peanut Commission, Don Koehler, predicted that it would cost peanut growers, processors and the sellers of peanut products $1 billion in losses.

Today, it’s another story. Koehler said the loss may amount to just one-fourth of that as farmers such as Newberry report another encouraging sign: Peanut shellers two weeks ago raised what they are paying for this year’s crop, which will be harvested in late September, from $375 to $400 a ton.

“I don’t think we’ve come all the way back,” said Newberry, 52, a fifth-generation farmer with a plot of about 1,100 acres in southwest Georgia, about 200 miles from Atlanta.

“Last year, they sold for $500 a ton. But it’s a sign that confidence has been restored. At $400 a ton, I can make a decent profit.”

Retail sales of peanut products reflect that the nation’s peanut eaters have pretty much blacked out the traumatic memories of January and February, when the sales of grocery store peanut butter — which were never linked to the outbreak — plunged almost 25 percent, and every day the Food and Drug Administration added dozens of products to its recall list, which reached to more than 3,200.

It was so bad in mid-February that Georgia’s poison peanuts were bigger news than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, prompting Blakely Mayor Ric Hall to call it “The Great Salmonella Media Event.”

Today, grocery store peanut butter sales, which had dipped to $67.5 million for the month of February, have almost fully recovered, to about $78 million during a four-week period in July and August, according to Chicago-based retail sales tracking company Information Resources.

Kellogg Co. was one of the companies hit hardest by the recall, which cost it between $65 million and $70 million. It reported in early September that weekly sales of its Keebler and Austin Peanut Butter sandwich crackers now match or exceed sales before the outbreak.

The National Peanut Board said that, according to its survey, consumer confidence in peanut butter started rebounding in May, when 70 percent of people who had quit eating peanut butter during the height of the scare said they had resumed eating it.

The turnabout is hard to figure — unless you understand how deeply rooted peanuts are in the American psyche, said Joseph Priester, a consumer psychologist and assistant professor of marketing at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

“In our culture, peanut butter holds a special place of convenience, perceived nutrition and, more importantly, reminiscence,” Priester said.

“People feel attached to peanut butter. It is, and has been, part of their lives, from being given peanut butter sandwiches by their mothers as children to sandwiches to bring with them on picnics as adults,” he said.

It’s not shocking that people resumed eating it, Priester said. More revealing is that, during the worst of the scare, sales of peanut butter dropped only 25 percent — “and people were dying from eating this product,” he said.

If it had been spinach, it would have been a different story, Priester said.

“Spinach suffered a similar, relatively specifically caused outbreak of salmonella, and that consumption fell much more than 25 percent, and has not fully rebounded ever since.”

Priester, Koehler and others credit the FDA and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for sending a strong message to customers that the outbreak was tied to peanut paste, butter and meal produced by Peanut Corp. of America’s plants in Blakely and Texas, which have been shut down, and not linked to Georgia peanut farmers or peanuts or to store peanut butter.

Peanut Corp. of America is now in bankruptcy proceedings.

That message eventually got through to customers such as Pam Turner, an Atlanta mother. She had quit buying Peter Pan peanut butter in January, when the national spotlight was on Blakely and the Georgia peanut industry, “because I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to take the chance.”

In June, she went back to buying about two jars a month. “My husband and daughter and I just love PB and J sandwiches,” she said. “I was in the store and just kind of reached up and grabbed a jar.”

Still, it won’t be a perfect recovery for the state’s peanut farmers.

Even without the salmonella scare, they produced such a bumper crop in 2008 that it will take through January 2010 for processors to finish roasting, shelling, and distributing peanuts harvested in September 2008, said Dr. John P. Beasley Jr., a peanut expert with the Crop and Soil Sciences Department of the University of Georgia.

“It’s supply and demand,” he said, “and right now, we’ve got too much supply.”