Why is butter so expensive at the moment? 

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It takes a lot of milk to make a small amount of butter. 

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If you take 2 litres of full cream milk and run it through a cream separator, you'll get about 100ml of cream.

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Putting that cream into a butter churn would give you about 50g of butter.

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So, 2 litres of milk will make about 50g of butter. 

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Whole milk contains 4% fat, cream has 40% fat content, and butter contains 80% fat.

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If you wanted to make a 400-gram block of butter, you would need about 20 litres of milk.

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The reason butter is going up in price is because the price of raw milk has been going up and there's also a lot of work involved in creating butter. There's a lot of equipment and labour involved in taking the water out of whole milk down to butter.

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I feel the pain of buying groceries. But I can’t see any way to make butter any cheaper than it currently is.

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There are only two big butter factories in New Zealand and they make butter for the export market and they make almost all of the butter sold in New Zealand too.

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These two factories are operating at a huge scale and are very efficient.

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If someone were to invest a few million dollars into building a butter processing factory, they would not be able to get their butter onto supermarket shelves cheaper than Westland and Fonterra. 

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In fact, they would probably be 25% more expensive.

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No one likes to hear this, but having made butter, I think that the price of butter is quite affordable. 

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