Butter becomes a luxury for some Europeans as price shoots up

Pastry chef Arnaud Delmontel rolls out dough for croissants and pain au chocolat that later emerge golden and fragrant from the oven in his Paris patisserie. In recent months, he has had to pay increasingly more for the butter so essential to their flavor—a price he says has shot up 25% since September alone. But he is refusing to follow some of his competitors who have started making their croissants with margarine. “It’s a distortion of what a croissant is,” Delmontel said. "A croissant is made with butter.” The butter inflation largely results from a global shortage of milk caused by declining milk production, including in the U.S. and New Zealand, the world's largest butter exporter, according to economist Mariusz Dziwulski, a food and agricultural market analyst at PKO Bank Polski. Across the 27-member European Union, the price of butter rose 19% on average from October 2023 to October 2024, including 49% in Slovakia and 40% in Germany and the Czech Republic—numbers, however, which don't reflect further hikes. Since butter is sold in standard sizes, food producers can't hide the price hikes by reducing package sizes, something known as “shrinkflation.” There is some debate about the impact of some of the other factors, such as climate change, which produces erratic weather patterns such as droughts. There is no letting up in the demand for butter and cheese, products that require significant amounts of milk fat. For decades, butter was vilified as unhealthy, but in recent years its image has improved thanks to studies that showed that fat is not as damaging to health as once believed. Southern European countries, which rely far more heavily on olive oil, are less affected by the butter inflation—or they just don't consider it as important since they consume so much less. Since last year, the cost of butter shot up 44% on average in Italy—Europe's seventh largest butter producer—but it is not causing the same alarm as in butter-addicted northern Europe. This article was provided by The Associated Press.