New customers line up for N.B. peanut butter — and doughnuts too

G.E. Barbour may be best known for its King Cole tea, but the Sussex company’s peanut butter is apparently what everyone wants overseas.

Company president Jeff Rose said Barbours officials were in China recently to meet with an import partner and participate in a trade show.

They set up a booth that gave them an indication of how Barbours might fare if it entered the market there. 

“The lineup was 30 feet for four days with people excited to try our Fatso brand peanut butter,” Rose said.

With the ever-present threat of U.S. tariffs, companies like Barbours are looking across Canada and overseas for new markets.

It made a big push into the U.S. market a decade ago and had great success with its peanut butter products, more than doubling its sales, said Rose.

But then a year ago, the company that was founded in 1867, the year of Confederation, suddenly faced the prospect of a tariff on their products going into the U.S., and possibly even a counter-tariff on the peanuts they import from the southern U.S.

The tariffs still haven’t materialized because the company's products are covered by the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, but it was still a wakeup call to diversify Barbours' markets.

“We realized that at the end of the day we're going to have to adapt,” Rose said. “This isn't going away. This is the new reality, and one thing G.E. Barbour has done over the last 158 years is we’ve adapted.”

Mrs. Dunster’s is less than a kilometre away from Barbours and confronting similar challenges.

Co-CEO Blair Hyslop was working for Barbours when he and his wife Rosalyn learned of the opportunity to buy the 57-year-old bakery business in 2014.

Like Barbour’s, the company embarked on a strategy for growth in the U.S. and says it's increased their sales an average of 20 per cent a year and the workforce to about 225 from 50.

At the beginning of last year, they had plans to double the size of the company in three to five years, based mainly on U.S. sales.