It's more like: you have a machine that evaluates whether the peanut butter you're producing is up to spec (right viscosity, right fat content, whatever), and if your machine complains and says your peanut butter isn't coming out right, you need a way to know if the problem is actually with your peanut butter or if it's that your peanut butter testing machine is miscalibrated. If you put the known-acceptable reference peanut butter through it and your machine says that's fine, it's your peanut butter, but if that also produces an error, you know it's your machine.

Consistency of the peanut butter and pureness.

Let’s say you are a large food producer and you have to make a pb&j sandwich. You are going to do a great deal of measurement, taste tests and other experiments to verify your sandwich is what it says on the box. Also packaging will be highly dependent and also even the nutrition label. Do you want to worry in the design phase that your sandwich has a variable consistency and weight ? No .

There is a YouTube video on this topic but I can't find the link.

For example if you are a company that has lab equipment that analyzes the nutrition content of a food sample, they could use this peanut butter as a reference sample to make sure their equipment is properly calibrated.

Probably the one linked above by Tom Scott, or this one by Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esQyYGezS7c

The Veritasium one mentions NIST peanut butter specifically, even.

> What is the benefit to food manufacturers?

The ability to put Facts on a "Nutrition Facts" label.

You can't take a written standard and put it into your mass spectrometer (or other equivalently fancy food-testing device) to calibrate it.

You don't. You take the NIST reference material and put it through your machine and compare your machine's results with the NIST results.

That's what I was getting at. Maybe we disagree about what calibrate means?

Suppose you're in the business of preventing peanut allergy death. It may be beneficial to have a known sample of a peanut butter during R&D.

> What is the benefit to food manufacturers?

Its used for calibrating their instruments (or to validate the calibration of their instruments), which are THEN used to report on their products contents, which if they are found to be sufficiently in error there are adverse consequences.

Having a reference material whose composition is very certain is important here.