Who put rocks in the butter?
Prime Future 166: the newsletter for innovators in livestock, meat, and dairy
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Today’s Prime Future is brought to you by centuries of dairy evolution, as chronicled in this fun little read:
The history of butter follows the same arc as the history of kerosene and Standard Oil. Sorta.
Part of John D. Rockafeller's genius was in taking a highly variable product and standardizing it so that the customer experience would be consistent & predictable, which allowed it to scale.
Except then, of course, kerosene was replaced by electricity. While there have been many attempts to replace butter both by bad science and by Napoleon, long live the conquering hero, Butter.
(Btw does it seem weird to bring Napoleon into this? I thought so too, but y’all, it turns out that butter’s first real challenger, margarine, was a result of an award that Napoleon offered to anyone who could invent an alternative to butter that was cheaper and more shelf stable in order to feed his army. Margarine was the result. Even more interesting is that when margarine came to the US, it was largely butter companies who launched the product, riding the health marketing wave. To make it taste better, some combined butter and margarine. All of this feels like plant-based meat dynamics today are simply a shadow of what happened decades ago…nothing new under the sun, amirite?)
You can look at the history of almost every food product and see a similar dynamic in the drive towards standardization followed by a drive towards differentiation, whether the adoption of meat grading in beef to drive consistency of eating experience, or stabilizing the heat gene in chili peppers so that spice level would be the same every time, or <drum roll please> the standardization of butter.
I think of this natural market maturation as a continuum, and where a category sits on the continuum impacts where innovation & technology impact the consumer experience: