These days, seed and nut butters abound. Of course, peanut butter still gets top billing in the US, but a walk through your local grocery store will reveal enormous variety—almond butter, cashew butter, pecan butter, pistachio butter, pumpkin seed butter. They’ve even recast granola as a spread.
One often-unsung hero of this spreadable cohort is sunflower seed butter. The first commercial versions of sunflower butter were introduced in the 1980s, but consumers found their bitter taste and greenish color off-putting.
Fast forward to the early 2000s, when peanut allergies were quickly becoming more common among adolescents. The USDA entered into an agreement with Red River Commodities (a US-based producer of sunflower seeds) to develop a new sunflower butter that resembled “the flavor, texture, and appearance of commercially available peanut butter.” Sunflower seed butter, developers reasoned, would be a profitable use for a domestic crop while serving as an allergen-free alternative to peanut butter. With a modified roasting process, which decreased bitterness and bumped up the toasty flavors, plus very tight color specifications, sunflower butter was reborn.
SunButter, the final product of the collaboration between the USDA and Red River Commodities, was once just about the only sunflower butter you could find—unless you made it yourself. Today, sunflower seed butter is growing in popularity, and several competitors have entered the market. It’s a solid nutritional stand-in for peanut butter, with more vitamin E and less saturated fat. It’s also more environmentally friendly than some nut butters, like almond butter, which requires massive amounts of water to produce. Some sunflower butter brands are widely available, while others are strictly DTC, but can any of them stand up to SunButter, the sunflower butter pioneer? We put 10 jars to the test to find the absolute best sunflower seed butter game in town.
How we picked the products
SunButter is arguably the most well-known brand and the easiest to find in stores. And for many people, the brand itself is synonymous with the product—like Xerox for copies or Kleenex for tissues. For that reason, we decided to taste almost every variety of sunflower butter SunButter makes: original, creamy, crunchy, no sugar added, and organic. We skipped the chocolate this time around.
We also asked Bon Appétit staffers for recommendations and combed the internet to find as many direct-to-consumer brands as we could. We passed on brands like SunFly, which, as of printing, is only available overseas, but put in orders for sunflower butter from places like Thrive Market and karmalize.me, which ship to your door. We also included as many supermarket brands as we could get our hands on.
How we set up our blind taste test
To get a well-rounded sense of how each sunflower butter tasted, we sampled each contender on its own, as well as spread onto whole wheat toast points.
Similar to natural peanut butter, some sunflower seed butters will separate as they sit. Some samples on our tasting list contained stabilizers and remained perfectly smooth throughout the tasting. We vigorously stirred any that didn’t to reincorporate the oil before spreading and sampling.
How our editors evaluated
A great sunflower butter starts with a warm, roasted seed flavor. Our tasters said their ideal sunflower butter would have a similar savory nuttiness to peanut butter—though, realistically, no one expected an exact dupe. They hoped for minimal bitterness and a dose of salt to punch up its flavor.
