Shea Simmons
People love butter. Maybe that’s not so shocking to hear, but it turns out, butter might be how people are getting through 2020—and who can blame them?
Famous butter brand, Land O’Lakes, explained that its sales will be up 20% this year, despite a reduction in bulk buys from restaurants due to the pandemic. Altogether, Americans are slated to buy 275-300 million pounds of butter. There are a few reasons butter’s popularity has risen. First, more people are cooking at home due to social distancing and stay-at-home orders.
Perhaps the biggest reason, though, is everyone’s baking. Remember the banana bread boom earlier this year? How much butter did you add to your freshly baked sourdough? How about all those cupcakes?
The boom in baking was, perhaps, most well-represented during the flour shortage over the summer, but the same didn’t apply to butter.
Beth Ford, chief executive officer at Land O’Lakes, explained why there isn’t a butter shortage despite its continued popularity.
“Oftentimes, even for the retail business, what you do is you make a lot of butter because it’s peak milk production time,” Ford said. “And you store it for the key [winter] season. But the buying was so strong that we didn’t do that, because we were selling right off the line.”
