The U-turn
Marmite Peanut Butter is back on shelves. Unilever quietly dropped it last September with the usual “changing shopper preferences” line, then quietly brought it back this month after nine months of complaints, petitions, and the kind of social media noise that the brand insists it does not respond to but evidently does.
It is back in Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Co-op, Ocado, at the same 225g tub, for around £3 to £3.50. Same recipe, same label, same product. Welcome back.
Why it deserved to come back
Marmite Peanut Butter, for the uninitiated, is exactly what it sounds like: peanut butter with Marmite mixed through it. Sounds horrible, works beautifully. The peanut butter softens the Marmite’s sharper edges, the Marmite carries the peanut butter’s slightly cloying sweetness back to the savoury side, and the resulting spread is one of the more genuinely useful things in your toast options.
It is also a properly good cooking ingredient. A spoonful into a satay sauce gives it depth that plain peanut butter does not have. Stirred into noodles with chilli oil and a splash of soy, it is a five-minute lunch. The 2019 launch was one of the better Marmite spinoffs.
So losing it last autumn was a small bereavement for the people who actually used it.
Why Unilever pulled it in the first place
The boring corporate answer: SKU rationalisation. Large CPG companies are constantly killing off products that fall below an internal volume threshold, and Marmite Peanut Butter, being slightly niche even within Marmite’s user base, was probably bumping along just under whatever the internal cutoff was.
The slightly less boring answer: somebody on the team had not realised quite how loud the user base would be. The Peanut Butter Marmite community is small but absolutely committed, and they spent the autumn explaining at considerable length on social media why the discontinuation was wrong.
What this tells us
Three small things.
First, that Unilever do read the complaints. Whatever the brand reps tell you about being driven by spreadsheets, a coordinated audience can change a decision. This is genuinely useful to know.
Second, that this cycle (launched 2019, killed 2024, back 2025) is fast in CPG terms. Most failed products do not come back. This one did, in nine months, which means somebody was already nervous about the discontinuation when they made it.
Third, that the Marmite brand is sitting in an interesting place. With the parent company looking at “non-core” classifications (see the non-core classification story), the bits that need stronger user loyalty are the bits worth protecting. Reinstating a niche product nine months after killing it is, I would guess, partly about reminding everyone that the brand has a genuine fan base, not just a wholesale order book.
What to do about it
Buy a tub. Eat it. If you genuinely use it, buy a second tub for the cupboard, because the bigger lesson of the past nine months is that the next time Unilever decides to “rationalise the portfolio”, this is the kind of thing that goes.
A jar bought is a vote cast. Vote for the peanut butter.
Source: Unilever press, June 2025; Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Ocado availability data.
