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Kerrygold is marketed as grass-fed and all-natural, but the tub butter has concerning ingredients, dangers and marketing ploys to consider before buying.
Kerrygold, without question, is probably one of the best store butters you can buy. I myself have been using it for years for cooking.
The milk is from grass-fed cows and even though the cream used to make Kerrygold Butter is pasteurized, it is the best choice available to most folks who do not have access to raw butter from a small farm or who simply don’t want to use their precious raw butter for cooking.
I also know that many of you out there use Kerrygold too. When I conducted a Butter Poll on this blog awhile back, by far the most used butter (out of 1,500 or so total votes) was Kerrygold which received way more votes than even Organic Valley butter.
So what’s the problem?
My husband brought home the “new” Kerrygold butter the other day. On the surface, it looked fine. Nowhere on the outside of the package was there any indication that there was a problem with this butter. Here’s what it looks like.
I got suspicious with the “new” label, however. There’s nothing “new” about butter. That’s what I like about it after all!
Another tip-off that there was a problem lurking was the proclamation on the label that this “New Kerrygold” was “naturally softer”.
When I first saw the “naturally softer” words, I thought that meant that the butter was whipped and hence more spreadable. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want air whipped into my butter. This is a surefire way to get less product and get charged the same price for the privilege if you know what I mean.
I made a mental note to tell my husband not to buy this butter again because it was whipped and not as good a value.
But then, it got way worse…
Is Kerrygold Butter Grass-fed?
I took off the lid to the new Kerrygold package and saw the following words:
I had become a victim of the Big Fast One!
Kerrygold is stealthily selling LOWFAT butter and guess what? You get to pay the same price for the cheaper quality!
NOWHERE on the outside of the label did it say that the butter was low-fat. The ingredients said simply: pasteurized cream and salt the same as the commercialized Amish butter at the supermarket.
I daresay that this marketing ploy will be fooling a lot of folks who desire to buy full-fat grass-fed butter.
It seems that some butter brands have adopted what companies making substitutes for butter have been doing for years.
I have become very tuned in to these labeling tricks and manufacturer games over the years. When it comes to packaging, I double-check the ingredients along with the manufacturing processes every few months. This is even for products that I’ve been buying for years.
But how many people really do this?
Ingredient Bait and Switch
You NEED to be doing this!
Manufacturers are changing ingredients and packaging all the time! The primary intent of these “improvements” is to increase product sales and profitability. Your health is, sadly, of little to no concern in the grand scheme of things.
Reducing the fat content in its butter will skyrocket profits for Kerrygold as they will make the same per unit for the butter and yet be able to sell the skimmed cream to other companies to make ice cream or whatnot thereby increasing revenue substantially.
If you buy Kerrygold, I’m not telling you to stop buying it. I’m only telling you to beware of this new packaging nonsense and be sure what you buy is what you intend: full-fat butter!
By the way, if you are wondering why I love full-fat butter, you might want to educate yourself on the low-fat scam by learning about the history of butter vs margarine in the United States.
As for me, I will be returning this product to the store for a full refund. It is falsely advertised after all. I had no way of knowing it was a low-fat product until I opened it.
Manufacturer Response
I received this email from Kerrygold following the widespread sharing of this article. I find it very hard to believe that my blog suddenly brought this packaging error to their attention.
Do they have NO ONE on the production line in charge of quality control? This was not a difficult problem to identify. Could we have a bit of spin going on here? Perhaps so.
Dear Sarah,
Your blog has brought to our attention a packaging error of which we were unaware. While Kerrygold does sell a Reduced Fat & Sodium Butter the pack you show on your blog is 100% full fat butter which has been packed with the incorrect inner seal. There is no deliberate intent on our part to mislead our valued consumers or to misrepresent our product although we regret the confusion this is clearly creating.
We are working to identify how much product has been released into the market with the incorrect packaging so that we can replace it as soon as possible. In the meantime we would appreciate your assistance in clarifying the misunderstanding to your readers. We would love to provide further clarity — our email is [email protected] — and we are happy to answer any specific questions you and your readers may have in relation to the product.
With thanks & regards,
The Kerrygold Team
Why I No Longer Buy Kerrygold
I wanted to let all of you know that I no longer buy even the traditional Kerrygold brick butter in foil packaging. Why? A good friend visited Ireland and traveled extensively to a number of grass-based dairy farms.
This credible source told me that while the cows that provide cream for the Kerrygold butter are definitely on pasture and hence “grass-fed”, they receive supplemental GMO animal feed as well especially during the winter months. The local community and citizenry in Ireland concur and will tell you as much if you are in the area.
So, the word on the street is that Kerrygold is not legitimately pastured either.
Butter from cows that get GMO feed introduces the very real possibility of Roundup residue in the butter.
Thanks but no thanks!
While I have not been able to confirm this story 100%, I trusted the credibility of the information enough to permanently switch to another brand (I currently use this one).
I use this butter for cooking in addition to the homemade pastured raw butter I make for non-cooking purposes.
I also no longer recommend Kerry Gold in my Shopping Guide.
What about Organic Valley butter as an alternative to Kerry Gold? While I am not happy about Organic Valley’s policy that disallows member farmers to sell raw milk on the side to their community (treating them more like medieval serfs than the independent business owners that they are), I find this less onerous than deceptively feeding animals GMO feed without clearly informing the end consumer.
Just for comparison I highly recommend to try polish butter which you can find in larger Sainsburys on the speciality food shelves. It’s packed in the blue foil wrap with “Maslo Polskie” on the top which simply means polish butter. This butter tastes like butter produced in my home country Ukraine. I really wonder why butter in the UK tastes so much different.
I am an Englishman now residing in Sweden. I shall try your suggestion regarding Polish butter. For years ,when I lived in England, I bought and enjoyed Kerrygold. I have also eaten delicious butter from England, Ireland, Denmark, France and Germany and all are very similar.
Unfortunately I cannot stand Swedish butter since it smells and tastes rancid, even when fresh! All brands of Swedish smör (butter) are the same. I have to buy German butter from LIDL, or travel to Denmark and buy Danish butter. Does anyone know why Swedish butter is so disgusting?
I’ve been in Norway in 2012 and my friend bought a particular brand of Norwegian butter in block form and its golden color and taste far surpassed Kerrygold. Have no idea what’s in Swedish butter.
The Swedish add a lactic acid culture (called mjölksyrakultur) to their butter to increase its shelf life.
http://translate.google.se/translate?hl=en&sl=sv&u=http://korvhantverkstockholm.se/mjolksyrakultur/&prev=search
Apparently this is a common practice in eastern Europe and it gives their butter a distinctive flavour, but which I find tastes rancid!
English, Irish, Danish and French butter only has salt added and it tastes delicious.
The UK or new Zealand COWS ARE GRASS FED YEAR AROUND.
EASTERN EUROPEAN COWS ARE NOT SO LUCKY.
IN ADDITION TO THE ABOVE SAID, THERE ARE MANY ADDITIVES TO ENHANCE THE TASTE AND THE COLOR APPEARANCE OF THE FINAL PRODUCT..
I buy KerryGold and prefer it to any other butter purchased in the US. I don’t fry a lot of food and have noticed, when I do fry, it stays the color you start with and doesn’t turn brown like other butters. I will continue to use it. I buy the block of butter. Thank you for the article on their new tub butter.
WRT your comment about having air whipped into the butter: European butter is sold by weight (250 grams, in this case), not volume, so you would be getting the exact same amount of a given product. Having said that, I’m totally against all this low-fat butter nonsense.
I buy Kerry Gold in the blocks and I shop Costco and I see NO tubs of the “new” Kerry Gold at my store.
Interesting!!
Yeah well, miss label? Your’s is the regular inside and not low fat and sodium? Ok. How about the outside “new”. Still no where on the outside says low fat and sodium inside.
Kerrygold, it’s your turn
Beverly, did you read their email to Sarah?
I’m late to this party and confess to not reading all the comments. There may be some folks from the UK commenting on this. I returned to the USA in 2013 after spending three years in England. There, Kerrygold is, in fact, nearly the cheapest butter at the Tesco. Someone offered that you couldn’t pasture cows year-round because of the weather, but Ireland never gets that cold in the winter because of the Gulf Stream. The reason British farmers keep cows off the fields in the winter is because the ground is too wet and the cows tear the pasture to pieces (again, monoculture at work–farmers who use multiple grasses build fields that support the cows even when wet).
Once back to the states I began looking for Kerrygold, and can’t find anything like it over here. The stuff discussed here is all Kerrygold USA, and I will be blunt: they think they are marketing to rubes, people who will eat any dross. Kerrygold USA products are overpriced and not comparable to what I found in the UK.
This is part of an overall trend I have noticed. Americans eat terribly compared to Europeans. I lived there in total for over six years, and there is no comparison between the quality of our foods. At the pubs we laughed at how much water comes out of our “bacon,” something you would never get from British bacon. I could go on for pages. Yes, there is plenty of garbage in European markets and groceries, but if you want to eat real food, minimally processed, it is everywhere and at a reasonable cost compared to what is here in the USA.
After spending a lot of time working this from different angles, I finally understand the “buy local” emphasis. It’s the only way to really have any way of knowing what’s in your food. It takes so much work here, where in Europe I only visit the butcher to get everything pasture-raised.
I can’t attest to prices in the UK, but in Ireland itself kerrygold is the most expensive butter to buy in the stores (at least the stores I checked: Aldie and Dunnes.) They also sold generic butter that was cheaper and just as yellow. Wish we had those options here in the US.
No water in British Bacon? Sorry, but you are wrong. Sainsbury’s sell a low salt bacon which has become impossible to fry-there is so much water in it. Water and white gunge ooze out, and any fat already in the pan just spits & splatters all over. I have bought bacon from Waitrose which also oozes water & white gunge. The only bacon “as it used to be” is dry-cure. By the way, since Sainsbury’s began to sell it, we have bought Oscar Mayer bacon (which we discovered in Florida), because it tastes like “bacon used to taste”. Then a problem began; slices were so thin you couldn’t separate them. I wrote to Sainsbury’s about this, and the slices do seem to be a bit thicker – comparatively! Since I can’t find any other low-salt bacon, I now buy only the Oscar Mayer and dry-cure bacon. I want fried bacon – not poached!
You do know that all milk cows are given supplemental feed (Oats, Corn, Barley, etc) during milking so they retain their weight and energy levels?
Here’s an article with links to other companies for butter: http://hopecentric.com/why-i-stopped-buying-kerrygold-butter/
As a consulting engineer I can tell you that mistakes happen, and in hindsight, the mistakes, often look really stupid. But c’est la vie!
I also doubt the cows are 100% grass or pasture grazed, that’s just not possible given the cold Irish climate. My recommendation is ANCHOR BUTTER from New Zealand, the color and taste is as you’d expect from the authentic real butter. Although it doesn’t say so on the pack, the cows are fed grass year round, they even sleep outside under the stars! I know Whole Foods Markets in CA carry it, some stores in Chicago like Treasure Island. It’s also available on-line at http://www.buyanchorbutter.com.
I stopped buying Anchor Butter (which was my favourite) years ago after reading that the DDT used to spray crops (now a banned substance) remained in the grass which fed the cows, and remained in the milk which was made into butter & cream. It said that DDT took decades to disappear, and there was a build-up from grass-to cows-to by-products.
DDT was used in many countries including the UK and USA but it was banned decades ago. NZ banned its use on farmland in 1970. DDT is classified as “moderately toxic” by the United States National Toxicology Program (NTP)[63] and “moderately hazardous” by the World Health Organization (WHO), based on the rat oral LD50 of 113 mg/kg.[64] DDT has on rare occasions been administered orally as a treatment for barbiturate poisoning. Giant NZ dairy company Fonterra tests scrupulously and will not take milk from a farm that has 1mg/1litre of milk. Millions of NZer drink nothing but NZ milk and eat NZ cheese and NZ Ice Cream, and survive. To single out NZ from all the other countries that also used DDT is ridiculous.
Cows in Ireland are grass fed all year round. This became obvious in 2010 when we had the coldest winter ever and cows had to be kept inside. There was no food available and irish farmers had to buy feed from the UK, the reason being it is not normal practice. Oh ya we have stars here too;)
I always used to buy Anchor butter until I read an article many years ago about DDT (now a banned product). DDT doesn’t disperse but remains in the grass & earth for many years. Animals eat the grass, ingesting the DDT which remains in the flesh and milk and builds up as time goes on. DDT was used in New Zealand (the article stated) long after it was banned here in the UK. In fact, I read in a newspaper not many years ago that Anchor butter still showed traces of DDT.
I had a feeling something was up with Kerrygold butter when they changed their packaging. Now I know they changed more than just the packaging.
I’ve never tried it but recently I’ve noticed President butter is available at my local Walmart superstore (of all places). By what I’ve gathered, it’s real full fat butter that’s supposedly made from grass-fed cows on dairy farms located in Normandy, France, which is located on the southern Mediterranean coast where lush grassy fields are abundant nearly year round, much like that in Ireland where Kerrygold butter is made.
Also, President butter is cultured, Kerrygold butter is not. I like cultured butter more anyway because it can be made more flavorful than uncultured butter without the need to add salt. And, because It uses fermented cream, it’s even more healthful by containing beneficial probiotic bacteria.
I’m definitely going to try President butter next time around.
Correction: Normandy is located on the northern coast of France. Sorry about the geographic brain fart.
Don’t they teach geography in the schools anymore? Or are you are recent grad of the public school systems here in the US? Normandy is NOT on the southern Mediterranean coast of France. It is located in the NW coast of France, across from the UK separated by the English Channel. Get out a world atlas and look! Oh, how entertaining this thread has been over the years.
I use President butter almost exclusively, because my local Meijer (big box northern chain) doesn’t carry Kerrygold at all. Our local WalMart *does* have Kerrygold, and I bought some to compare it to President. I prefer President.
Good grief! Why so many replies like this from you? This is a such a wonderful, civilized thread. I’m enjoying great comments and learning a lot, but then get an unpleasant and shocking slap to the face with every one of your comments.