Welcome to the Ground Up headquarters - where all the nut butter magic happens! At our warehouse + production facility in Portland, Oregon, we do everything from mixing nut butters, to working on sales and marketing campaigns, to shipping out orders. But there's so much more that happens between all these steps!

In this blog post, we're showing you the behind-the-scenes process of creating our nut butters, and the many hands that touch our jars before they find their way to grocery stores (or your doorstep!).

At Ground Up, we provide job opportunities for womxn overcoming adversity. During their time working with us over the course of 6-9 months, womxn gain the skills and confidence they need to transition into their next phase of life. Learn more about our training program here and meet the womxn on our team here.

First we receive shipments of our raw materials (mostly glass jars and a LOT of nuts!). Tiffany, our warehouse manager, uses the forklift to organize pallets for easy access on production days. Tiff navigates the forklift around the warehouse like nobody’s business!

Next, the team gets to work on the many steps involved in creating our nut butters! Molly, our production manager, starts production days off by asking a question of the day before divvying out kitchen roles. But before we get down to business, we have someone choose a playlist to play on the speaker. Music is essential for maximum productivity (and fun) in the kitchen!

First up on production days: unboxing, labeling, and dating jars! Cian, our labeling supervisor, manages this aspect of production - and does so with a big smile on her face! Fun fact: the batch dates on our jars are always written by hand.

While jars are being prepped, we start getting batches of nut butter ready!

Mandy, one of our mixers, carefully measures out ingredients, pours them into our industrial food processor, and starts grinding. After they blend for several minutes, they transform into our delicious nut butters! Next up, the mixer and our production manager taste test each batch for quality control and make adjustments as needed. It’s a hard job to taste test nut butter all day, but someone’s got to do it! :)

We then pour the nut butter into large bowls to transfer them from the mixing station to our filling station. This step is harder than it sounds! Bowls of nut butter are quite heavy, and pouring nut butter without spilling is a tedious process. This is definitely a two-person job!