One of America's Favorites - Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich

A peanut butter and jelly sandwich

The peanut butter and jelly sandwich or PB&J is a sandwich, popular in North America, that includes a layer of peanut butter and either jelly or jam on bread, commonly between two slices of bread, but sometimes eaten open-faced or with one slice folded over.

A 2002 survey showed the average American will have eaten 1,500 of these sandwiches before graduating from high school.








Peanut butter was first paired with a diverse set of foods such as pimento, nasturtium, cheese, celery, watercress, and on toasted crackers. In a Good Housekeeping article published in May 1896, a recipe "urged homemakers to use a meat grinder to make peanut butter and spread the result on bread." In June of that same year, the culinary magazine Table Talk published a "peanut butter sandwich recipe." The first reference of peanut butter paired with jelly on bread to be published in the United States was by Julia Davis Chandler in 1901 in the Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. By the late 1920s, this sandwich eventually moved down the class structure as the price of peanut butter dropped. It became popular with children. During World War II, it is said that both peanut butter and jelly were found on U.S. soldiers' military ration list, as claimed by the Peanut Board.








A peanut butter and jelly sandwich made from white bread, with two tablespoons each of peanut butter and grape jelly, provides 27% of a person's Recommended Daily Intake of fat and 22% of their calories.

While roughly 45% of the calories are from fat, most of them come from monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which have been linked positively with heart health.








In December 1999, two independent inventors, Len Kretchman and David Geske, were granted U.S. patent, "Sealed Crustless Sandwich" for a peanut butter sandwich that would have a long shelf life. The J.M. Smucker Co. bought the patent from the inventors and developed a commercial product based on the patent called Uncrustables. Smuckers then invested US$17 million in a new factory to produce the product. By 2005, sales of Uncrustables had grown to $60 million a year with a 20% per year growth rate.

Smuckers attempted to enforce their patent rights by sending out cease and desist letters to competitors, and by expanding their intellectual property coverage via the patenting of a machine to produce Uncrustables sandwiches in high volume. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, however, rejected the viability of the patent citing its similarity to existing processes such as that of fashioning ravioli or pie crust.