Store-Bought Peanut Butter Cookies Ranked From Best To Worst

There may be no more interesting way to use peanut butter than tossing it into the mixing bowl and turning it into peanut butter cookies. But home baking isn't always possible, and when the idea of enjoying a proper peanut butter cookie lingers like a dream on the verge of coming true, it takes an exceptional store-bought selection to keep the magic alive. Which boxed peanut butter cookies can serve as a suitable stand-in for homemade?

To lay the gustatory confusion to rest, I rounded up the best brands I could find and laid them all out on the table to determine which store-bought peanut butter cookies rock my world and which brands crack under the pressure. It wasn't an unpleasant task by any means, even considering the lesser creations in the running. There were definite losers, several clear winners and a few supreme selections that stuck in my snacking brain long after the tasting was through. You can read more about my methodology at the end of this article, but for now, here's my ranking of store-bought peanut butter cookies from best to worst. 

A more natural version of a peanut butter sandwich cookie sounds like just the kind of compromise cautious snackers may be in search of. Usually, this sort of balancing act tips the scale against flavor in favor of upholding the principles of wholesome snacking. Back to Nature bravely steps into the fray to provide a plant-based treat that uses a trim list of recognizable ingredients to create a similar product as the other producers. Could this actually be a benefit to the peanut butter cookie lovers of the world?

Surprisingly, it could, and it is. Who knew there could be an even better version of peanut butter sandwich cookies than Nutter Butters? I wouldn't have dreamed such a thing was possible (yes, I dream about snacks ... like you don't), but Back to Nature feels like a more refined version of the standard design that doesn't get too persnickety to be loved. They were so delicious, the box was half-empty before I finished writing my round-up. Coincidentally, but my stomach was half-full. Funny how that works.

Wow, Walmart ... How many different versions of peanut butter cookies can one retailer offer? With Marketside Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies, the big-box chain gets in a punchy luxury offering that smacks of gourmet ambitions. The optics of having a wheatier, meatier, oversized cookie with uneven edges and chocolate chunks large enough to be mistaken for broken candy bars certainly is attractive. However, looks can only take a cookie so far, and I was doubtful these visually appealing bakes could hold up their end of the bargain.

How wrong I was, and how happy I was to be so. Now this is what bakery-style peanut butter cookies should strive to be! Lumpy and bumpy but not the least bit dumpy, Marketside provides a rustic bake with peanut butter you can practically taste just by looking through the clamshell package. And when you finally do taste it, it has the flavor and texture of a homemade peanut butter cookie, with the right balance of snap and softness to steal your heart away, right along with your taste buds.

If ordinary Nutter Butters are the peanut butter cookie blueprint, then Nutter Butter Double Nuttys are the deluxe expansion plans ... as if Nutter Butter needed any improvements. Still, Nabisco hauls out the big guns and piles on twice as much filling to create Nutter Butter Double Nutty cookies, a PB version of Oreo Double Stuf for fans who need a little more sweetness in their treatness.

Two times the filling turns out to be a generous upgrade that doesn't over-sweeten the situation. Unlike the world's most popular cookie, the double-up of cream center in this creation is a modest addition rather than a colossal increase. You can still use the open-and-scrape method to remove the filling first, but there's no crumbly collapse if you go for a bite of the whole enchilada. It may also be the only way I'd ever consider a variant of the original Nutter Butter design to be an enhancement instead of a cheap money grab. Well done, Nabisco!

Ah, Nutter Butter — the original peanut-shaped peanut butter sandwich cookie. These charming treats set the childhood peanut butter cookie standard for me, and it's been a high climb for any other packaged option to register in my eyeline. Before this tasting, it had been several years since I'd enjoyed one of these crunchy nuggets. I worried that they wouldn't live up to my much-hyped youthful nostalgia, even with their charming shape and whimsical texture still very much in effect.

What more can be said about this classic that isn't known by Nutter Butter fans already? It's got the roasted-toasted flavor in a cookie that's a delight to crunch into; it has the peanut butter buttercream center that ramps up the sweetness without becoming cloying. And it's the perfect shape for dunking in milk without getting your fingers wet. It's a cookie I just can't say "no" to, even if there are a few overachievers that ended up outranking it this time.

Great Value does this really sneaky thing with its peanut butter sandwich cookie. In the legal world, it might be called larceny; that's how similar a Great Value Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookie comes to replicating Nutter Butters signature creation. There's a round cookie instead of one shaped like a peanut, but the shell-like imprint is present on top, the roasted flavor is there in the cookie itself, and the cream filling is the same color and consistency. It's like Walmart clicked copy/paste, then trimmed the edges and took credit for a cookie that already exists. The nerve!

Funnily enough, Great Value actually does pull off its imitation Nutter Butter with tasty aplomb. The cream is a bit sweeter and more vanilla-leaning, but the cookie is convincing and the smaller shape lets you scarf them down without having to bite them in half. Not that I scarfed them down. And even if I did, it was just me and the package in the room at the time, and that piece of plastic isn't telling any tales from the garbage can.

Is Kroger copying Nabisco a little too closely with its Really Nutty cookies, essentially another round Nutter Butter knock-off? From the sandwich cookie structure to the peanut shell ridges on top to the layer of cream in the center, there's nothing but copycat cookie craft happening here. Even the vivid red packaging is almost identical. The only thing the chain does differently is opting for a circular shape rather than the hourglass peanut form. Other than that, it's a direct steal of the Nutter Butter template, with a slightly lower price. Could it be such a different experience than the original it was based on?

Actually, yes. The cookie is more wheat than peanut and the cream center is more vanilla than peanut butter. A copycat of a copycat, Kroger mimics Great Value (or does Great Value mimic Kroger?) with a rounded peanut butter cookie. But it's one thing to have two peanut butter cookies that are almost identical; having three on the market only complicates matters. Offering such a similar yet slightly less enjoyable experience, it's impossible to rank Kroger higher than Great Value. It's a very narrow margin that separates them, though. 

There's no way Oreo would miss out on the peanut butter potential, especially with the brand's propensity to incorporate just about every possible flavor into its cookies from Swedish Fish to candy corn. Oreo Peanut Butter is such an obvious partnership, I was surprised I hadn't encountered it somewhere in my snacking life up to this point. Imagine how buzzed I was to find a package among the current flavors, taking up shelf space like they belonged in the permanent collection.

I could get super-excited thinking about a disk of peanut butter filling smashed between two chocolate halves of a classic Oreo. The fun peanut butter cup possibilities are enough to send me into sugar shock. The similarity in flavors between the cookie and the filling keep the blend from becoming a distinctly chocolate-peanut butter combo. Maybe if these were milk chocolate-dipped or if the cookies were milk instead of dark chocolate, the flavors would be more complimentary. Still, it's a wonderful cookie, as an Oreo always is — it just isn't the best peanut butter cookie in the pack.

Those clever bakers at Kroger give the store label ChipMates a triple-dose of delicious ingenuity with Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk cookies. It's a treasure trove of peanut butter chips and chocolate chunks sunk into a peanut butter cookie base, a description that reads like a 4-year-old's version of what a cookie should be. Luckily, my snacking sensibilities top out at the 4-year-old level, so this little morsel is right up my alley.

In all honesty, this cookie isn't a bad attempt at making something more than just a chocolate chip peanut butter cookie with peanut butter chips coming along for the ride. But the dough is a bit bland, and the peanut butter chips don't stand out enough from the base of the cookie to be necessary. I'll call them pleasant, because they are, and maybe passable, because they're that, too. I might even dub them palatable, but there's no chance ChipMates could rise to the level of premier, premium or prime. And once you've exhausted your alliterative adjectives that start with the letter P, the peanut butter party pretty much peters out.

Walmart's in-store bakery isn't about to be bested by factory food peanut butter cookies lounging about in the shelved area. It kicks up a little peanut dust with its Freshness Guaranteed Peanut Butter Cookies, found among the other plastic-packaged selections that cost a little more, but usually taste at least somewhat better. This is the sort of cookie that makes a great contribution to an office potluck or a party where you're the guest who doesn't want to spend too much, but also doesn't want to look like a total cheapskate.

They may also be the cookies everyone passes up in favor of more dazzling fare. Freshness may be guaranteed here, but peanut butter cookie pleasure is not. The bland cookie has only trace amounts of peanut butter flavor, while the sparse Reese's Pieces-style candies do their best to help. There's only so much a random scattering of sweets can do to shake this bakery-style peanut butter cookie out of its doldrums. To quote just about everyone's dad, where this cookie is concerned, "I'm not mad, just disappointed."

When other peanut butter cookies go hard, going soft isn't necessarily a bad move. Soft cookies capture the home-baked texture better than crunchy biscuit-like treats, a concept Kroger Supreme chases after with its Soft-Baked Peanut Butter Cookies. The Supreme selection appears to be the chain's attempt at elbowing Pepperidge Farm down the shelf a little, but looks can be deceiving. In this case, looks are an illusion of quality that no one should fall for.

What a disappointment to discover that the cookie inside the bag is one of the most assembly line-looking snacks I've ever seen. You can see the lines where the machine slices off each wedge after the dough gets pushed through the press. They're soft enough, yes, but the bag contains eight cookies for $4.00 or so, a cost that doesn't justify the bite. We Americans may love our peanut butter in cookie form, but we know a scam when we see one.

Target steps up to the plate with a gluten-free, soft-baked peanut butter cookie from its Favorite Day bakery brand. The packaging is pretty and the concept feels elite, like a designer version of a peanut butter cookie you could serve at a tea party, and nobody would laugh at you for anything other than the fact that you're actually having a tea party. If anyone even bothered to show up, that is. And if they did, these would be the cookies to serve.

Single-bite peanut butter cookies are a delicious danger, the perfect size for accidental mass consumption via the well-known One After Another technique. These chewy coin-size snacks offer a subdued peanut butter flavor embedded in a texture that feels like a softer shortbread. Had it been a little cheaper, I would have had no problem ranking this bag higher on the list. But at almost $5.00 for 14 mediocre-yet-gluten-free cookies, it seems better to stick with a three-ingredient flourless homemade cookie instead – and you don't even need a tea party to enjoy those.

High-protein eaters hoping to maintain their macros while keeping up with their snackros — er, their snacking — have a pair of pals in Benny & Barry, the creative minds that originated Lenny & Larry's High-Protein Peanut Butter Cookie (that's not a typo ... their real names are one letter different from the brand name). The company's entire line is known for its health-minded profile, but the concept fits naturally here, considering the protein content found in peanut butter. If only that thoughtfulness extended to the taste.

The flavor of this healthy cookie is as flat as the surface of the treat itself. It seems that in the process of making it plant-based and protein-packed, the enjoyment seeped out and got left on the assembly line. The one thing this pricey, overlarge (one cookie is two servings, be warned) indulgence has going for it is the soft texture. A feature like that feels like a cheap trick when you finally experience the flavor, or lack thereof. At a list price of more than $2.50 per cookie, this one makes me yearn for something much better.

Whenever a fitness company makes the jump from bars and shakes to more traditional snacks, the results are a roll of the dice. Quest sees value in offering a baked peanut butter cookie pumped full of protein, kept low-sugar, made keto-friendly and featuring probiotic fiber. That's a lot of promises for a cookie to fulfill, prompting the notion that you can either have your fitness or you can have a peanut butter cookie you like eating, but you probably can't have both. Quest easily proves the idea true.

Nobody told this company that peanut butter cookies are supposed to taste like peanut butter, not dirt. I suspect it's the protein content that drives this oversized bite into bad-flavor overdrive. Fitness fiends who crave something sweet but are loath to step beyond the bounds of their macro count may find comfort in having a so-called treat to quell their temptation. But if gustatory satisfaction is the goal in your peanut butter cookie consumption, consider this Quest a fool's errand.

Sometimes, it feels like I was born to judge snacks on their varied merits. This particular taste test was a comparison I've been working toward all my snacking life. I had an early idea of which brands would be included and did a little searching through the cookie aisles of my neighborhood grocery outlets to learn what creations had cropped up since the last time I went scratching the itch for peanut butter cookies to nosh on. It was a decent mix that gave me plenty to work with.

I took the straightforward approach of simply tasting each cookie and jotting down my thoughts and feelings immediately afterward, determining the ranking based on how well the cookies delivered on their peanut butter promise. I considered the taste and texture foremost while also taking into account value for money.

Somehow, I believed the distinctions wouldn't be as drastic as they turned out to be. I had great faith that food producers had conquered the mysteries of making peanut butter cookies, and any variance between brands was simply a matter of tweaking the recipe to avoid stealing someone else's. It turns out after tasting 13 differing contemplations of what a peanut butter cookie can be, I know that there's no such thing as simplicity in the world of packaged snacks. Consider me enlightened.