55Bloomberg Businessweek
helps preserve freshness andtu
Americans have come to associat
But Kerrygold’s salted butter,its
tured. Bradley says that, again,die
flavors of fresh grass do passintofini
Legally, a butter maker can addyello
but Kerrygold’s color comesfromth
grass. “I don’t know of anyonewhoa
“And certainly not the Irish.”
Kerrygold tends to fare well inblindtast
fact, reliably win top honors.In 2014
Illustrated published an evaluationofsalt raised
Kerrygold as “silky” and “custardy”butchoseLurpakasthe
all-around favorite; a Bon Appétit tastetestfrom 2018 endorsed
Organic Valley’s Cultured Pasture Butter as best in class. Chris
Morocco, Bon Appétit’s deputy food editor, says that among
the “fancy supermarket butters” that were tested, differences
tended to be minor and often a matter of personal prefer-
ence. Some tasters might like a nutty, grassy product such as
Kerrygold; others, a brighter, more neutral flavor.
But in the court of public opinion, Morocco agrees, the
Kerrygold brand reigns supreme. He credits good marketing—
its gold foil packaging and strong association with Ireland—for
helping it stand out. “The butter has a sense of place, which I
think is key,” he says. “I couldn’t tell you where Plugrá comes
from. Lurpak comes from Denmark, but is Denmark known for
rolling green hills? I don’t know. But Ireland? I’ve been to Kerry.
It’s a lot easier to make that connection.”
This association with Ireland hasn’t always been a plus.
In 1998, Ornua executive Róisín Hennerty was dispatched
to the U.S., charged with designing a marketing strategy for
Kerrygold, and found local impressions of the country to be
mixed. “Research showed that Americans loved Ireland, but
when they thought about food they thought about the famine,
Guinness, and boiled corned beef and cabbage,” she says. “It
was a terrible place to start.” To make matters worse, retailers
tended to want to stock Irish products only around St. Patrick’s
Day, as a holiday novelty, rather than as year-round staples.
“When you’re in beside the Guinness and the green lemon-
ade—well, you might not want to be merchandised that way,”
Hennerty says.
She decided to focus her efforts on the West Coast, where
consumers were more likely to seek out high-quality, natu-
ral food products, and to target only three retailers where
affluent Americans tend to shop: Whole Foods, Costco, and
Trader Joe’s. Hennerty was given a tiny advertising budget,
so television campaigns and splashy magazine ads were out.
She brought a handful of young Ornua employees to the U.S.
to do store tastings, exposing shoppers to the product while
also selling them on charming Irish shtick: emerald hills,
multigenerational farms, happy cows.
ndcelebratingeshavebuoyedsales,too.Afterdecadesof
nizinganimalfats,Americanswerebeginningtoembrace
theAtkinsdietjustafterKerrygoldenteredtheU.S.market.
Butterandbaconwereback.Since 1999 percapitabuttercon-
sumption in the U.S. has increased from 4.6 pounds per per-
son to 5.8 pounds in 2018—its highest point since 1968. More
recently the growing popularity of the ketogenic diet, a very
low- carbohydrate, high-fat regimen, has given the brand an
added boost. Kerrygold is favored by keto adherents because of
its grass-fed production. (The diet doesn’t just discourage eat-
ing grains, but eating food from animals that have eaten grains,
too.) On Instagram the 70,000 posts tagged #kerrygold often
share billing with such tags as #ketoporn and #ketochef. Dave
Asprey, the wellness guru and entrepreneur whose Bulletproof
diet is a close cousin to keto, introduced a wildly popular rec-
ipe for coffee mixed with a hunk of butter in 2009. He recom-
mends Kerrygold by name.
Today, in addition to butter, Kerrygold’s U.S. product line
includes an extensive array of cheeses, including cheddars,
Swiss, and a specialty cheese called Dubliner, as well as an
Irish cream liqueur. Butter, though, still accounts for the lion’s
share of sales. Ornua recently introduced Kerrygold Butter
Sticks—unsalted and salted butter in parchment-wrapped
quarter-pound bars—to appeal to American home bakers, who
are accustomed to measuring out butter this way. The cooper-
ative says sales of sticks have exceeded every forecast. At the
peak of butter season, Kerrygold Park operates 24/7, and the
main thing limiting production is the factory’s single churn.
But how much cream can the cows on one little island pro-
duce? Since the European Union removed dairy production
caps in 2015, Irish farmers have been building their herds, and
milk output has soared, from 5 billion liters (1.3 billion gallons)
a year to almost 8 billion today. (U.S. production, by compari-
son, is 96 billion liters.) Ornua’s agricultural analysts say that,
given constraints on pasture land and labor, milk volume will
reach 9 billion liters by 2022, with growth tapering off thereaf-
ter. But Jeanne Kelly, a representative for Ornua, says there’s no
risk of a butter shortage. Plenty of Irish dairy still goes to low-
er-margin uses, such as milk powders, and driving more of it to
a value-added product such as Kerrygold is exactly what Ornua
was built for. “Ireland running out of cream?” Kelly repeats my
question, with amusement. “Ah, that’d be the day.” “It tastes like
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but tHennertyalsocourtedearlyfoodinfluencerssuchasDavid
bovitz,thepastrychef-turned-bloggerandcookbookauthor,
andSaraKateGillingham,co-founderoftheblogtheKitchn,
invitingthemtovisitIrelandtoseeforthemselves.Graduall
a sortofgrassrootsfollowingtookhold.AlisonRoman,the
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iestessofmillennialdinnerparties,hasteamedwiththe
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