Jif is owned by J.M. Smucker Company (NYSE: SJM), a publicly traded food conglomerate with a ~$12 billion market cap headquartered in Orrville, Ohio. The Smucker portfolio includes Folgers coffee, Dunkin' packaged coffee, Meow Mix, Milk-Bone, Hostess — and, most relevant to this profile, both Jif and the two leading natural peanut butter brands: Adams Peanut Butter and Laura Scudder's.
Smucker has engineered a position where it captures consumer spending across both ends of the peanut butter market simultaneously. The health-conscious consumer who avoids Jif because of its additives and buys Adams or Laura Scudder's instead is still buying a Smucker product. The brand architecture is deliberately siloed — Adams and Laura Scudder's packaging does not cross-reference Smucker or Jif, and the Jif packaging does not reference the natural lines.
Jif's history before Smucker: created in 1946, reformulated and nationally launched by Procter & Gamble in 1958 using P&G's industrial hydrogenation expertise from its soap and shortening businesses. P&G sold Jif to Smucker in 2002 as part of a portfolio consolidation, retaining its focus on personal care products.
No influencer-equity conflicts. No paid celebrity investors. Jif's marketing is traditional CPG broadcast advertising, with the "Choosy moms choose Jif" campaign running in various forms since 1981 — one of the longest-running taglines in American food advertising.
The yellow score reflects the campaign's specific framing: positioning Jif as the premium, quality-conscious, maternal choice is a direct inversion of the ingredient reality. Jif is the most additive-laden product in the mainstream peanut butter category — it contains more non-peanut ingredients than any of its major competitors. The campaign successfully weaponized parental care and quality-consciousness as brand attributes for a product that, by ingredient standards, is the furthest from those values among its peers.
The campaign made no specific health claims. Its power is in what it implied without stating: that choosing Jif over other peanut butters was a deliberate quality decision, the choice of a discerning parent. That implication has driven category leadership for over four decades.
Single retail purchase, $4–7 per jar. No subscription, no DTC pressure, no auto-renewal. Straightforward grocery aisle transaction. The revenue model is clean.
This is Jif's defining dimension. The ingredient gap between Jif Creamy and natural peanut butter is substantial:
The key ingredient is fully hydrogenated vegetable oil (rapeseed and soybean). Hydrogenation is an industrial process that adds hydrogen atoms to unsaturated fats, converting them to a more saturated, solid form. The purpose in peanut butter is stabilization: it prevents the natural peanut oil from separating to the top of the jar. The consequence is that Jif's fat profile is meaningfully different from natural peanut butter — the heart-healthy monounsaturated fats characteristic of peanuts are partially displaced by hydrogenated fats.
Fully hydrogenated vegetable oil (as distinct from partially hydrogenated oil, which contains trans fats) is not classified as a trans fat by the FDA. It does not appear on the label as such. Whole Foods Market lists it on their "unacceptable ingredients" list regardless, on the basis that the hydrogenation process alters the fat profile in ways the company considers inconsistent with their product standards. Jif is not sold at Whole Foods.
Additionally: 3 grams of sugar per serving from added sugar and molasses. Natural peanut butter contains zero added sugar. Over a year of daily use, this adds up to approximately 2 pounds of sugar consumed from peanut butter alone.
Jif makes no meaningful scientific health claims, which is honest given the product's formulation. The brand has historically relied on taste and quality perception rather than health positioning. The yellow score reflects the absence of any affirmative scientific backing for the product's formulation choices — specifically, the hydrogenation — rather than any fabricated claims.
The FDA's 12-year regulatory standoff over peanut butter's composition standard is worth noting here. When P&G introduced Jif with non-peanut ingredients, Skippy and Peter Pan followed. The FDA initially proposed requiring 95% peanut content. All three brands lobbied for a lower standard. After over a decade, the FDA settled at a 90% peanut minimum — the threshold written into the current Standard of Identity for peanut butter. The current standard is, in part, a product of industry lobbying by the brands that benefited from it.
Jif's label is technically accurate. Every ingredient is disclosed. The nutrition facts are correct. No FDA enforcement actions have been taken against Jif's labeling specifically. The yellow score reflects what is absent rather than what is false.
The fully hydrogenated vegetable oils are disclosed by name on the ingredient list — but without context for what hydrogenation means, most consumers don't know this differentiates the product from natural peanut butter. The word "creamy" in Jif Creamy is the only signal that the texture comes from industrial processing rather than being a natural property of finely ground peanuts. That framing gap — between what the label technically states and what a reasonable consumer understands — is the yellow score.
In May 2022, J.M. Smucker recalled all Jif peanut butter produced at its Lexington, Kentucky facility — the largest peanut butter production plant in the world — due to potential Salmonella contamination. The recall covered products with lot codes 1274425 through 2140425. Twenty-one people were confirmed ill across 17 states; the CDC investigation linked the outbreak directly to the Lexington facility.
Smucker estimated the recall cost $125 million in direct losses. Multiple class action lawsuits were filed. The FDA and CDC investigation found that the contamination was present in the facility environment. Smucker halted production at Lexington, conducted remediation, and restarted operations later in 2022.
The red score reflects the severity and scale of the contamination event — the world's largest PB facility, a multi-state outbreak, and $125 million in losses — combined with the absence of any proactive, publicly available batch-level safety testing. Consumers using Jif have no mechanism to verify lot-specific safety independent of Smucker's own quality control, which failed in 2022.