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Bloomberg Businessweek October 7, 2019like in your mind, whereas so much butter just tastes sort
of waxy, like fat and salt,” she says.
Of all the 50,000 items for sale in the average American gro-
cery store, butter is one of the simplest: cream that’s churned
to separate out the buttermilk. It can be cultured—fermented
with live bacteria to bring out tangy notes—or salted. That’s
pretty much it. And yet, according to the Irish Dairy Board
(rechristened Ornua Co-operative Ltd. in 2015), sales of
Kerrygold products have increased by double digits in every
one of the past nine years. Volume soared 30% in 2018 alone,
and growth is now humming along at eight times the pace of
the butter category overall. What on earth is Kerrygold doing?“I guess you could say that Ireland kind of skipped the Industrial
Revolution.” I’m in a car with two Ornua employees, one of
whom is reflecting aloud on Ireland’s landscape and economy,
which both remain dominated by agriculture. We’re wind-
ing along lonely roads on the way to a dairy farm in County
Waterford, along the country’s
southeast coast.
Dairy is big business here.
Buttermaking in Ireland dates
back 6,000 years, and in the
19th century, the Cork Butter
Exchange was the world’s larg-
est butter market. The country’s
mild, wet weather produces some
of the world’s best grass-growing
conditions, which has made dairy
a natural export industry. In 1961
the Irish government set up the
Irish Dairy Board, which created
the Kerrygold brand the following
year to boost the value of Irish dairy exports. (It’s been sold in
Ireland, too, since 1973, and is currently the country’s best-
selling butter brand.) Two-thirds of the land in Ireland is still
used for farming, and 80% of that grows grass. Today the coun-
try has one dairy cow for every 3.6 citizens, with only 10% of
the bovine output consumed domestically.
Three hours after leaving Dublin, we arrive at the home of
Tom Power, a young farmer with sandy blond hair dressed in
blue jeans and Wellington boots. He’s one of more than 14,000
Irish farmers who supply milk to Ornua, a cooperative owned
by Irish dairy processors, which are, in turn, owned by the
farmers. It’s a misty day, and we’re surrounded by fields an
electric, almost surreal shade of green. We pile onto a tractor
to see the cows, which Power moves every 12 hours, so they
always have fresh grass in front of them. He shows me an app
on his phone that keeps track of how much grass is on his farm
and which pastures have the greatest volume. “It’s like looking
at how much money is in your bank account,” he says. Right
now, he’s a rich man: This has been a superior year for grass.
Unlike in the U.S., where 100% grass-fed production rep-
resents only 1% to 2% of dairy farms, in Ireland a grass diet is the
norm. Irish cows benefit from the longest grass-growing seasonin Europe: They graze for as many as 300 days each year. In the
winter months, they eat primarily fermented grass known as
silage. Public policy plays a role, too. Ireland’s Department of
Agriculture closely monitors each farm’s stocking rate, ensur-
ing they don’t raise more cows than they have the grass to
feed. With enough pasture available to support the cows, buy-
ing grain to feed them would amount to an added cost, with-
out the added benefit.
After visiting the Power farm, we travel 30 minutes
down the road to see where the butter gets made. I’m half-
expecting quaint artisanal wooden churns; instead, we roll up
to Kerrygold Park, a highly automated €38 million ($42 mil-
lion) facility capable of producing as many as 50,000 tons of
butter per year. As we put on protective hairnets and scrub
our hands with antibacterial soap, Norma Hanlon, the cus-
tomer relationship manager, tells me that they churn butter
here only from March to October, when the cows are out graz-
ing and the cream is therefore at its best. That’s a hard-and-
fast rule, and the facility must
make and freeze enough in this
period to satisfy demand year-
round. My visit coincides with
peak grass season, and the place
is running full tilt.
On the factory floor, we watch
the churn spin like a cement
mixer doing double time, as a
technician swaddled in ster-
ile coverings samples the but-
ter, analyzing it for fat, salt, and
moisture content. The butter
flows out the consistency of cake
frosting, coursing through a net-
work of pipes to be stamped into bricks, wrapped in foil,
boxed, and chilled.
Among both the amateur and professional cooks I spoke
with, the prevailing theory to account for Kerrygold’s creamy
texture is that the butter has more fat and less moisture than
mainstream American butters. But Kerrygold unsalted butter
clocks in at 82% butterfat and the salted at 80%, the U.S. legal
minimum. Harold McGee, the food science expert and author of
On Food and Cooking, says the type of fat plays a much more sig-
nificant role than the amount in texture and baking properties.
Robert Bradley, a professor emeritus of food science at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison and an expert on butter,
backs that up. He says anytime a cow eats fresh grass, it cre-
ates cream higher in oleic acid and conjugated linoleic acid,
heart-healthy unsaturated fats that are liquid at room tem-
perature. In cream from animals fed grain, however, satu-
rated fats dominate, which makes for a stiffer, more brittle
butter. (The manufacturing process affects texture, too, but on
that front, Bradley says, there’s little difference among today’s
mainstream processors.)
What about flavor? Robustly flavored European but-
ters are often cultured—inoculated with a bacterium that PREVIOUS PAGE: PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY 731. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: PHOTO: COURTESY ORNUAButter inspection at Kerrygold Park