Butter prices give European consumers, bakers a bad taste
PARIS
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.
The price for the butter so essential to the pastries has shot up in recent months, by 25 percent since September alone, Delmontel says. But he is refusing to follow some 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.”
One of life’s little pleasures — butter spread onto warm bread or imbuing cakes and seared meats with its rich flavor — has gotten more expensive across Europe in the last year.
After a stretch of post-pandemic inflation that the war in Ukraine worsened, the booming cost of butter is another blow for consumers with holiday treats to bake.
Across the 27-member European Union , the price of butter rose 19 percent on average from October 2023 to October 2024, including by 49 percent in Slovakia, and 40 percent in Germany and the Czech Republic.
In Germany , a 250-gram block of butter now generally costs between 2.4 and 4 euros ($2.49-$4.15), depending on the brand and quality.
The increase is the result of a global shortage of milk caused by declining production, including in the United States and New Zealand, one of the world’s largest butter exporters, according to economist Mariusz Dziwulski, a food and agricultural market analyst at PKO Bank Polski in Warsaw.
European butter typically has a higher fat content than the butter sold in the United States. It also is sold by weight in standard sizes, so food producers can’t hide price hikes by reducing package sizes, something known as " shrinkflation .”
A butter shortage in France in the 19th century led to the invention of margarine, but the French remain some of the continent's heaviest consumers of butter, using the ingredient with abandon in baked goods and sauces .
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 percent on average in Italy, according to dairy market analysis firm CLAL.
Italy is Europe's seventh-largest butter producer, but olive oil is the preferred fat, even for some desserts. The price of butter therefore is not causing the same alarm there as it is in butter-addicted parts of Europe.
Delmontel, the Paris pastry chef, said the rising costs put business owners like him under pressure. Along with refusing to switch out butter for margarine, he has not reduced the size of his croissants. But some other French bakers are making smaller pastries to control costs, he said.
“Or else you squeeze it out of your profit margin,” Delmontel said.