The Sincerest Form of Nutter Buttery

The other day, James and I were over at the 7-Eleven picking up beverages, when I saw something that made me do a double-take.

What the...? How is that even possible? How has Nabisco not sued them for copyright infringement? I mean, look at this:

The font is similar, the alliterative repetition is obviously intentional. The whole thing just seemed ridiculous. So I decided to try them, of course. But in order to be fair, I needed to compare them to the original, right?

They're both made with real peanut butter!

At the convenience store, the Nutter Butter is priced a $.99 and the Pitter Patter (eye roll) is $1.49. However, the Nutter Butter is four cookies at 1.9 ounces, whereas the Pitter Patter is 8 cookies at 3.9 ounces, more than twice as much. The Nutter Butter works out to $.52 an ounce, and the Pitter Patter is $.38 per ounce.

The ingredients were both enriched flour and sugar at the top. The next ingredient in the Nutter Butter is peanut butter. The next ingredient in the Pitter Patter is soybean and palm oil. Then the fourth ingredient in both is reversed. This is where it breaks off: In the Nutter Butter, the final ingredients are graham flour, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, salt, leavening, cornstarch, soy lecithin, and vanillin. The final ingredients in the Pitter Patter are whole grain oats, dextrose, invert sugar, and then less than two percent of whey, salt, flavor, baking soda, cornstarch, and soy lecithin.

The calories per serving with the Nutter Butters is 250, and for Pitter Patter, 140... but they're grossly different serving sizes. It breaks down to 4.71 calories per gram with the Nutter Butter; 5 calories per gram with Pitter Patter.

But what about the cookies themselves?

The design on the Nutter Butter is supposed to look like the lines on a peanut. It seems like the Pitter Patter was trying to recall the crisscross pattern of a homemade peanut-butter cookie.

The peanut-butter-made filling on the Pitter Patter was creamier, but similar to a peanut-butter flavored Oreo-filling, wheras the filling in the Nutter Butter was more akin to actual peanut butter.

Go home, Candy Corn Oreos. You're drunk!

The filling in the Nutter Butter is a little thicker, but the Pitter Patter cookies are thicker. The Nutter Butter cookie is like a peanut-butter-flavored Oreo whereas the Pitter Patter cookie is closer to peanut-butter-flavored shortbread.

James and I concurred that if you put the filling from the Nutter Butter into the Pitter Patter, you'd have something really special. As for me, price- and ingredient-wise, I'd choose the Pitter Patter. The cookie is better, instead of just being a cardboardy vehicle for the filling, like Oreos are.

So, I started of skeptical and scoffing, but they actually did the Nutter Butter one better. Have you tried them? What do you think?