The price of butter

Thank you for pointing this out.
I noticed several months ago that butter which had been about 90p a lb was creeping up so I used to take advantage of "3 for £2" or whatever offer was on.
Now it is £1.40 a lb for the cheapest own brand and often more. I assumed it was yet another consequence of Brexit!
I don't blame the farmers for giving up when they couldn't get a decent price for milk (our local dairy farm first of all gave up daily deliveries, then went out of business altogether) but had not considered the knock-on effect. Presumably cheese will be affected too.
I fear this is the price we pay for CHEAP food

Yes JackyB thank you for this information.

Maw I think you are right - milk has felt uncomfortably cheap fir a very long time and now we are facing just one if the consequences.

During recent holidaying in Dorset, we bought butter from farm shops - top price we paid was £1.79, but it was the best I have ever tasted.

I pay £1.30 at the moment. We get through 3 packs a week as I bake cakes for local friends and DH and I are both more than partial to a bit on toast!

Well, let's see what Christmas brings!

Really we are expecting a lot of price hiking now because of Brexit =.

Yes I had noticed the rise recently. I also don't understand what was going on with the bare hands thing either, surely that's a definite no no!

Only use one pack a week or thereabouts, still a cheap price for a good product though, and prices of butter do go up and down, had nobody noticed this?

If my maths is correct and it may be wrong, since it's a very long time since I taught how to do percentages, I think it is a 200% rise.
It's shocking.
However, I think farmers were being paid a pittance for their products. No wonder many went out of business.

I buy my butter mostly in Aldi. It was .79p per pack at the time of the brexit vote and is now £1.30. The latest rise was from £1.18 - £1.30. I don't know the individual prices of all my shopping but butter always stands out for some reason.

I paid £1.23 for a pack at Lidl this week---that's the lowest price round here. I shall put a few packs in the freezer ready for the Christmas baking marathon.

Good idea chicken. Ooo-er - maybe we will now have a butter-rush!

We buy butter when it's on offer and freeze it. President butter is lovely and also a Welsh one we can get in the supermarket, though that's never on offer.

Don't think the rising price of butter has anything to do with Brexit. That is just a red herring. It's the law of supply and demand and human greed that has caused this. Dairy farmers being paid less than it costs them to produce milk by the big supermarkets driving the prices down and down and forcing them out of business. The number of dairy farmers in the UK who have gone to the wall having spent the last few years trying to raise families on incomes under £10k pa is forcing prices up, plain and simple. When a commodity becomes scarce it becomes a premium product at a premium price. We, the consumer, have only ourselves to blame.

I mentioned this in a thread months ago and was promptly shot down by others saying the price was unchanged. My dad loves his Lurpak . I know there are cheaper brands but it's one of his little pleasures so who am I to tell him to change?

I love Kerrygold and this week is went up in my local supermarket from 1.70 to 1.90!!!

I try to buy locaĺy produced and organic in order to support local farmers who cannot make a living otherwise. One of our friends pays his dairyman weekly more than he is able to give his wife monthly for their own necessities. There are clearly things which are very wrong. We will all end up going back to bartering at this rate especially if 'they' push through this 'cashless society' idea where everything is electronic so that we can be milched whenever deemed necessary.

My friend in Germany says it is happening there and also another friend resident in Spain is also complaining.
As far as the UK is concerned, I live in a rural area and cows have practically disappeared as the supermarkets (and us!) will not pay a decent price for dairy goods. My cousin is a farmer in Gloucestershire and he gave up dairy two years ago and now sticks to cereals on the flat and sheep on the hills. He keeps a couple of Jersey cows for milk and butter for the family but it is not good commercial practice any more unless people are prepared to pay a little more. Someone has to get up at 5 am to milk the cows and if there isn't even a tiny bit of profit in it to pay for wages and upkeep of machinery not to mention vet bills, then it is not worth doing. The supermarkets and the EU have a lot to answer for.

Estimating percentages. According to google
If we are trying to find n percent of x, we can estimate this percent using the following steps:
Round both n and x up or down to numbers that are easy to work with.
Multiply the rounded numbers together.
Divide the result by 100.

(£1000 x £3000) / 100 = 30

so it would seem that this increase is 30% I am not happy with this but do not have time to work out the reason.

However wikipedia says

Percentage increase and decrease[edit]
Due to inconsistent usage, it is not always clear from the context what a percentage is relative to. When speaking of a "10% rise" or a "10% fall" in a quantity, the usual interpretation is that this is relative to the initial value of that quantity. For example, if an item is initially priced at $200 and the price rises 10% (an increase of $20), the new price will be $220. Note that this final price is 110% of the initial price (100% + 10% = 110%).

Some other examples of percent changes:

An increase of 100% in a quantity means that the final amount is 200% of the initial amount (100% of initial + 100% of increase = 200% of initial); in other words, the quantity has doubled.
An increase of 800% means the final amount is 9 times the original (100% + 800% = 900% = 9 times as large).
A decrease of 60% means the final amount is 40% of the original (100% – 60% = 40%).
A decrease of 100% means the final amount is zero (100% – 100% = 0%).
In general, a change of x percent in a quantity results in a final amount that is 100 + x percent of the original amount (equivalently, 1 + 0.01x times the original amount).

Clearly all very interesting. I would consider however that percentages are to do with an increase in fractions of the whole and that when the price triples we just say so. And all this goes to show how easy it is to misuse arithmetic.

As Minniesmum says, it's nothing to do with Brexit - it really is paneuropean and Aldi and Lidl started the headlines here because they put their butter prices up last week.

It's not as if it's something big which has increased in price at this rate, but it will make a big difference to the less well off, if they use butter. Lots of people use margarine - that may well follow.

Am I missing something. Where could you buy a pound of butter for less than £1 a few months ago? Those small packs weigh 250 grams (which weigh just over 8 oz). I paid £1.40 for a 250 gram pack of Sainsbury's own brand English unsalted butter last week, making it about £2.80 for just over one pound weight. The cost has definitely gone up. The cost of many food products is creeping up, I think we will just have to get used to it.

We always have goat butter. More expensive at £1.90 a pack, but so much nicer than butter from cows milk. It's lighter than cow milk butter which, in comparison, tastes 'lardy '. A downside is that only the bigger supermarkets sell it. Don't think there will be a shortage in the dairy goat business. We have goat milk too. Apparently the molecules of fat in goat milk, butter etc are smaller than those in cow milk products and easier for your body to digest. It always used to be recommended for eczema sufferers too, before the advent of soya and almond milk.

My relatives in the U.S inform they too have increases in their dairy lines and many other products too. So brexit bashers put your thinking caps on. What is or who is responsible.
Hands up who say it has to be Mr Trump?

Allegedly, China is buying it all up. I've no idea if this is correct.
cupcake

I'm sure the price is rising but I don't but a lot of butter. As for mixing cakes by hand, my MIL came from a large northern family of bakers and was a really superb cake maker - she always mixed her cakes with her hands and DH was very surprised when we were first married that I didn't- He thought it was the norm! Alas, I don't have her skills and, after 36 years of baking cakes, I have today made the worst one ever, total collapse, it looks dreadful! Tastes ok though!!

I've noticed butter going up again in price and in fact there have been gaps on the shelf in my local supermarket for British butter.

That film was very interesting and I'm not really surprised that cream has gone up in price. I've often wondered how four pints of milk can possibly be sold for £1 and yet produce a profit to both farmer & supermarket.

As they say, with cheap food, the consumer may not be paying the price but someone along the line will be.

Yy, to the bare-hands cake production! Mixing a cake would be ok, as it's then going to be cooked but the filling?

I often make cakes by hand ,I made christmas pudding for a couple of hundred people by hand in a (new) metal bin a few years ago...I also buy direct from the farmer when possible,,milk is delivered to my doorstep and if he supplied butter and cheese I'd buy that too, until recently they would deliver bacon and sausage and morning rolls but there weren't enough customers to justify then doing it.It would need a change of habit for people to go back to local suppliers though I believe it would benefit us all

I never buy butter, unless we have people to stay.For baking I use soft marg. or sunflower oil.
I've just googled Waitrose Lurpack and it's £7.50 & kilo
Dairy farmers here have been protesting about the fixed low price of milk, so perhaps they're getting their costs back from butter?