WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN

Kingston, WA – As we learned from Blood, Sweat, and Tears:  what goes up, must come down.

But this doesn’t just apply to painted ponies and spinning wheels; at CB’s Nuts it also applies to our peanuts.

Our raw peanuts are staged in the Raw Room prior to roasting.  The Raw Room is on the ground floor of our facility and is separate from all other parts of the production cycle in keeping with stringent FDA mandates.  Our two circa 1929 Lambert barrel roasters are located on the second floor, in the Roasting Room, directly above the Production Room which is back down on the ground floor.

Left and center: Raw shelled peanuts are vacuumed up from CB’s raw storage room, traveling through pipes in the 2nd floor ceiling to the roasting room above.
Right: Brined and dried (but still raw) in-shell peanuts make the same trip.

So how do we get the raw peanuts up into the roasters?  With big vacuum snakes like the ones you grew up with (if you grew up with big vacuum snakes).  I just love these things.   The Roasting Supervisor will stick the nozzle end into the huge tote of peanuts (which sits on a scale) and suck the peanuts straight up through the ceiling of the Raw Room, through our upstairs office space (in pipes obviously), and directly into the two large hoppers that gravity feed into the roasters.  When the time comes the hoppers are opened and the peanuts are emptied into the roasters (compressed-air assisted hopper valves; it’s like Casey Jones, seriously).  When roasting is complete, the peanuts are emptied into cooling trays, and, when ready, gravity fed down into the production room through chutes that drop directly through the floor of the Roasting Room.  What goes up must come down.

Left and center: Freshly roasted peanuts are gravity fed from the roasting room to production, here making their way to the grinder where peanut butter jars are filled one at a time.
Right: Having made the round trip, our peanut butters are ready to be enjoyed.

The in-shell peanuts fall directly into the bagging machine to assist in bagging by hand of each package.  The shelled peanuts fall directly into our trusted Cantrell International grinder, are ground into a big stainless-steel funnel and then individually jarred by the Production Depositor.  This means that every single jar of CB’s Nuts peanut butter is jarred by hand, by one person at a time, and thus 100% visual quality control is always assured, without exception.  The same can be said of every bag of our infamous in-shell roasted peanuts.  It’s all pretty cool if you ask me.

I sometimes refer to CB’s Nuts as “a micro-brewery of peanut roasting”.  The analogy makes sense:  like a good micro-brewery, CB’s is a small volume producer using the best raw ingredients available.  All employees feel vested in, and proud of, the quality of what they produce.  The CB’s Nuts Roasting and Production Teams consist of a handful of dedicated and skilled individuals working together to produce the peanuts and peanut butter that we are known and loved for.  

And we still haven’t talked about brining . . .