I think these reference materials are more about how they’re well-characterized, right?<p>It’s peanut butter, sure, but it’s not meant to be <i>the</i> peanut butter or even represent any particular peanut butter.<p>Instead, it comes with a detailed document describing all of the kinds of measurements you could take on it and their expected results. If you’ve got a peanut butter testing machine, you can put some in there and make sure it spits out the same result.<p>So, you’re not comparing any peanut butter against it, just your machine’s results against the results expected.
It's intended as a reference material for some kinds of lab measurements.<p>Sorta related: NileBlue's total laboratory synthesis of chocolate chip cookie: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk</a>
People act like this price tag is high, but it's not the product you're paying for, it's the guarantee that the reference material has been exhaustively tested to meet an exact standard. This is a small price to pay if you're in food manufacturing, and a huge benefit to us all that there exists such standards.
Tom Scott has a video at the NIST.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/jvJzi0BXcGI" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/jvJzi0BXcGI</a>
The certificate [1] linked on the page provides more detail. Some quotes:<p>> This Standard Reference Material (SRM) is intended primarily for use in validating methods for determining
proximates, fatty acids, calories, vitamins, elements, amino acids, and aflatoxins in peanut butter and similar matrices.
This SRM can also be used for quality assurance when assigning values to in-house reference materials.<p>> SRM 2387 IS INTENDED FOR LABORATORY USE ONLY, NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.<p>> The SRM is
a creamy peanut butter prepared by a manufacturer of peanut butter products.<p>> Source and Preparation: SRM 2387 is creamy peanut butter containing roasted peanuts, sugar, partially
hydrogenated vegetable oils (48 % rapeseed, 40 % cottonseed, and 12 % soybean oil), and salt, and was prepared for
NIST as part of a larger production run.<p>[1] <a href="https://tsapps.nist.gov/srmext/certificates/2387.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://tsapps.nist.gov/srmext/certificates/2387.pdf</a>
Veritasium [1] did a video of exactly this and explains why it exists [at 2m35s]:<p>> An ordinary jar of peanut butter costs less than $5. And on the label you can see the ingredients and the amounts of different nutrients like protein, fats, sugar, and sodium. Those values have been measured by the manufacturer using different machines and analytical techniques. But how do you know those results are accurate? Well, this is where the government's standard jar of peanut butter comes in. It is mixed up so carefully and thoroughly that each jar contains exactly the same substance.<p>> "We take great pains at homogenizing these things. Make sure it's consistent."<p>> Then scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, take years to painstakingly identify the quantities of all the different compounds in the peanut butter with specified uncertainties. This peanut butter is then known as a standard reference material or SRM. They sell these perfectly characterized SRM samples of peanut butter to researchers and manufacturers so they can calibrate their equipment. Essentially, the buyer knows that their equipment is working properly if, when they run the standard peanut butter, they get the values NIST supplies on the certificate.<p>> "We've spent a lot of time to make sure that we're confident and, you know, we can spend years studying the amount of fat in here and trying to figure out exactly what those numbers are."<p>> So what you're paying for is not really the peanut butter, it's the knowledge of exactly what is in the peanut butter.<p>> "And so this is what really drives the cost of a standard reference material is our ability to assert the truth. We produce what I call truth in a bottle."<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esQyYGezS7c">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esQyYGezS7c</a>
Who do we think actually makes this peanut butter?<p>Is this probably just like peanut butter from one of the major peanut butter manufacturers, and then NIST just carefully measured and tested it?
(From the product label):<p>> Store at -20 C.<p>Yes, I do like my peanut butter deep frozen. It several hours of thinking prior to consuming the whole jar in one sitting.