The iconic product in every household manufactured entirely in South Africa for over 100 years

Tiger Brands’ iconic Black Cat Peanut Butter is celebrating its 100-year anniversary in 2026, with the spread being continuously produced since 1926.

This makes it a little bit younger than its parent company, which was founded by Jacob Frankel in Johannesburg in 1921 as Tiger Oats.

Black Cat was one of the first acquisitions for what would become Tiger Brands around 1940, after immense success producing breakfast oatmeal.

Today, Black Cat and Koo are comfortably alongside Jungle Oats as the mainstay brands of the Tiger, which has begun to roar again on the JSE.

Tiger Brands has recently shared how it makes the iconic Black Cat peanut butter, which remains a household staple to the present day.

One of the few products still completely manufactured within South Africa, Black Cat sources its peanuts from the North-West Province.

In the dry North West, rows and rows of groundnuts have been grown for decades to supply Tiger Brands’ peanut butter machine.

Between October and December, local farmers cultivate the peanuts, which are then harvested and sorted by a mixture of man and machine.

After the nuts are harvested and cleaned, they are transported to manufacturing facilities in Gauteng, where they are made into peanut butter.

Upon arriving in Gauteng, the peanuts undergo a strict quality assessment before being cleaned again and roasted.

After the roasting, the peanuts are finely ground to create the Black Cat peanut butter that is then sent on to supermarkets across South Africa.

The scale of the operation is immense, with Tiger Brands’ Chamdor facility able to process over 8,000 tonnes of nuts a year. This equates to 92 tonnes of peanut butter every single day.

Not much has changed in this process over the past 100 years, apart from technological innovation that enables more efficient production.

This process takes place all within South Africa, across the country’s two smallest provinces, just as it did decades ago.

Tiger Brands finds its roar

Tiger Brands has undergone a revival in the past few years, with the company finally shaking off several strategic missteps in its expansion deeper into Africa.

The company has also crucially turned around its struggling bread-baking business, which has seen its share price nearly double since Tjaart Kruger was appointed CEO.

As with many industrial conglomerates, Tiger Brands struggled with cumbersome industrial scale at the beginning of the 2000s.

It had snapped up stakes in Astral Foods and Oceana, along with investments in pharmaceutical giant Adcock Ingram and retailer SPAR.

The company has long since shed these holdings, with the overarching story of the past 30 years being one of refocusing to maintain competitiveness.

This made the company heavily exposed to its core business of milling and baking, which made up 45% of Tiger Brands’ profit in 2013.

The milling and baking business, underpinned by Albany and Jungle Oats, had seen its revenue double and profit margins triple in the 2000s.

This was not to last, with the food producer using its strong growth and cash generation to invest heavily in Africa.

Tiger Brands bought up controlling stakes in food producers across the continent, ranging from Nigeria and Cameroon to Kenya and Ethiopia.

The largest investment was a R1.6 billion purchase of a 65.7% stake in Dangote Flour Mills in 2012. This investment flopped spectacularly.

Sold for a symbolic $1, the Dangote investment marked the beginning of Tiger Brands’ retreat from Africa.

As much of management’s focus shifted towards Africa, its businesses at home came under intense competition. Albany in particular was feeling the heat.

This was compounded by a listeria outbreak that began at a Tiger Brands meat processing facility in 2017, with management facing intense scrutiny.

Between its 2017 and 2023 financial years, the Tiger languished as six of the 12 reported operating segments had double-digit declines in operating profit.

The profit from its largest segment, bakeries, fell by two-thirds; the groceries business profit nearly halved.

Since becoming CEO, Kruger has taken on the challenge head-on as he sought to revive the company.

Kruger has simplified the management structure, replacing the complex corporate structure with a new federated model to get executives closer to the factory workers.

This removed an entire layer of management, simplified reporting lines, and reduced costs.

Efforts in this area were coupled with Tiger Brands’ refocusing on the basics by maintaining equipment, upgrading plants, and improving efficiency.

This has been aided by Kruger’s willingness to focus on the winners and dispose of the brands where Tiger struggles to compete with international and local players.

Many personal care products have been laggards, which struggle to compete with the likes of L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble, but also Beacon’s chocolate business, which trails Nestlé and Cadbury and has struggled to remain profitable.