Peanuts, long relegated to the fine print of ingredient lists and sideline snacks, are finally getting the hype they deserve. And not just as a pantry staple, but as a performance essential—something athletes and everyday consumers alike rely on to stay fuelled, focused, and ready.
With its new campaign and brand line “It’s Not Nuts. It’s Peanuts.” The National Peanut Board (NPB) is taking a commodity crop and giving it the sort of brand platform usually reserved for global consumer giants—recasting peanuts as a modern American essential and, crucially, putting them at the centre of culture instead of on the margins.
Lead creative agency Special U.S. is treating the category with a premium level of craft, including teaming up with production company Not To Scale to create a series of stop motion films and stills created at very nearly peanut scale. Anthony Farquhar-Smith directed the campaign, the films of which consist of three 15” and two 6” following a tiny but outlandish group of friends powering through a whole host of activities, including peanut butter diving, a smoothie spa, and football on toast. The flexible ecosystem built for the entire commodity category stretches from a bright harvest-green identity and clean typography to stills on train wraps and micro-films at digital kiosks.
Across social, OOH, and video, copy leans into that voice—turning functional claims into cultural language, from “When energy dips, it’s time to dip back in” to “Mountain-sized energy. In a pebble-sized snack.” It’s a tone that mirrors the idea itself: accessible, confident, and rooted in real performance benefits. The media placements are equally specific: train cars, digital kiosks, stadium concourses, athlete content, and sports media—anywhere the brand can catch people in the act of moving, snacking, and getting things done. It’s not just about getting peanuts back into the national conversation; it’s about proving that a small, familiar ingredient can fuel a genuinely modern, culture-ready brand idea.
From Anthony Farquhar-Smith, director:
“When The National Peanut Board and Special approached us with the idea for these films , they encouraged us to be as nuts as possible in our approach! We collaborated together and created the big idea to make something very small.
Taking real peanuts and food as a starting point, after dreaming up the group of nut-sized buddies and the peanut-hooked scenarios we’d find them in, each film and still was first modelled in CG. Every character in every frame was 3D printed, and then we used these models to recreate each scene IRL over the shoot. The scale was minuscule, and it took an extremely talented team to pull it together, from the painters who coloured each of the 800 figurines by hand to the camera department who had to use several specialist lenses to capture all the action.”
