It carries flavour and can soak up all the spices, aromatics, and seasoning in our cooking. It is more yellow and has a higher fat content than the pale, grain-fed American butter — consequently, along with the judges and countless top chefs, they just can’t get enough of it.
Butter is one of the purest foods in the world, and we make lots of it. New Zealand is the largest exporter of butter, and last year we exported 525,000 tonnes which is a third of the global market and worth $2.54 billion, making it our second-largest export earner.
China is our biggest buyer, purchasing $786 million worth in 2024. Chinese people have some trust issues with their dairy products, and New Zealand is the most trusted and the butter considered to be of high quality.
Other large importers of butter are the US, Australia and the Philippines, but it’s almost unbelievable that we import about $3.69m worth each year, mainly from Denmark, India, Australia, France and Fiji.
The dairy export industry started from humble beginnings, with a few barrels of salted butter manufactured at the Edendale Dairy Co shipped to England on board SS Dunedin in 1882 alongside its cargo of frozen mutton. Today the industry employs 55,000 people, there are seven different brands of butter and New Zealanders on the global scale are the highest consumers of the product.
Hogging various media headlines at the moment is the price, as it is at an all-time high, and some seem to be trying to give Fonterra a guilt complex as if it sets the price and is responsible — but it is the global auction that sets the price.
Fonterra’s chief financial officer Andrew Murray stated our butter costs a lot less than you pay in Europe.
Is there an irony in all this? Farmers have been improving their environmental image, animal welfare, our clean and green brand and, of course, animals are grass-fed, with the long-term view that premier products attract high-spending customers which in turn help not only the farmer but the country — but we could struggle to afford what we produce. Butter is 49% higher than a year ago and could it be beef and lamb next, which is 50% higher than five years ago. However, what goes up usually comes down.
