The fewer nuts in the jar, the more you pay per kilo

On the spreads shelf a rule nobody planned holds true: the smaller the nut percentage on the label, the higher the price per kilo. Three jars from the same shop, percentages from the ingredient lists, today's prices:

• Go Vege peanut butter smooth 945 g: 20.99 zł (22.21 zł/kg), 100 percent nuts
• Go Active high-protein peanut butter 350 g: 12.99 zł (37.11 zł/kg), 86.8 percent nuts
• Nutella 350 g: 18.99 zł (54.26 zł/kg), 13 percent hazelnuts

What the Nutella label says

The ingredients from the product page, in order: sugar, palm oil, hazelnuts 13%, skimmed milk powder 8.7%, cocoa 7.4%, lecithin, vanillin. The law requires ingredients to be listed from heaviest to lightest, so there is more sugar in the jar than anything else.

Let's count what the producer states himself. The named percentages add up to 29.1 of the jar. Lecithin and vanillin are fractions of a percent. That leaves about 71 percent for the first two ingredients: sugar and palm oil. A 350 g jar holds 45 grams of hazelnuts, roughly what fits in one hand.

Honest caveats

These are three different products and nobody claims they taste the same. Nutella is a cocoa spread, not a nut butter; hazelnuts cost more as a raw material than peanuts; in the high-protein jar part of the price is whey protein concentrate rather than nuts. The differences in taste and recipe are real.

But the front of the jar says "spread with nuts", and the percentages on the back say what the jar is actually filled with. At 13 percent nuts you are mostly buying sweet fat with a nut flavour. At 100 percent you are buying nuts.

What the cheap jar's table shows

The 100-percent peanut butter has a full table on its page: 596 kcal per 100 g, 27 g of protein, 6.6 g of sugars, 9.1 g of fibre, and a Nutri-Score A printed on the jar. As caloric as nuts, because it is nuts. The energy density is high, as with any fat, so a spoon remains a spoon, but protein and fibre come bundled, and sugar isn't the first ingredient, just a natural trace.

A rule for the next shop

With spread jars, turn the label over and find the percentage of the main ingredient. That one number says more than the whole front of the pack: what you are actually buying, and whether the per-kilo price is the price of nuts or the price of sugar and oil. The same rule works for jam (fruit percentage), fish paste (fish percentage) and the frankfurters we wrote about a week ago.

Snugmeal reads those percentages for you: for products in your plan it shows the ingredients and values from the labels, not from the marketing.

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Data: prices, ingredients and percentages read live from product pages on zakupy.biedronka.pl on 24 August 2026; the nutrition table from the Go Vege peanut butter page. The "about 71 percent" estimate is one hundred minus the 29.1 percent named on the Nutella label, less trace lecithin and vanillin. Our own arithmetic.