U.S. Peanuts Win Taste Test

American grown peanuts recently beat out some of its main competitors in a European taste test.

100 regular peanut or peanut product consumers from London, Berlin, and Amsterdam took part in the test, which pitted U.S. peanuts against Chinese and Argentine varieties.

While the consumers passed U.S. peanuts with flying colors, they identified about 70 percent of Chinese lots and 40 percent of Argentine lots as being problematic.

The U.S. grew about 4.1 billion pounds of peanuts during the 2003-2004 marketing year. But we kept most of them for ourselves, exporting just 516 million pounds.

Most of these exported peanuts went to Europe, so winning this taste test was important for U.S. peanut exporters.

Timothy Sanders of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service lead the research which is published in the Aug. issue of Agricultural Research.