With Americans staying home more than usual, and doing lots of baking and cooking to pass the time, 2020 has been an exceptional year for butter https://trib.al/TSszFD4 

Butter production is up 6% over the first nine months of the year, and could top two billion pounds for the first time since 1943.

Land O’Lakes expects to sell 275 million to 300 million pounds of butter this year — a 20% increase http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

Butter’s been on its way back now for a while.

On a per-capita basis, Americans eat far less than they did in the first half of the 20th century, but way more than in the 80s and 90s http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

Butter lost out to margarine for a few decades thanks to:

Loss of regulatory advantages
Cost
Links to heart disease
http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

The health claims against butter were later mostly debunked, and it benefitted from the good-food revival that began in the 1960s — Julia Child wasn’t going to use margarine.

It also just, well, tastes better http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

Butter is a survivor, as is the dairy industry in general. It’s faced many challenges recently:

Giant dairies driving smaller farms out of business
Competition from almonds, oats and other plants
Two big milk marketers have filed for bankruptcy http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

But while milk demand is declining, that’s more than offset by rising sales of everything that can be made out of milk http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

Even with milk sales there’s been an interesting shift:

Whole milk outsold 2% milk for the first time in 15 years in 2018
Skim milk sales drifting downwards

That’s good for farmers — whole milk is the most profitable http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

Sales of butter and yoghurt have kept the dairy industry going.

But the main driver of the industry’s resilience is cheese. Americans consume almost three times as much of it per-person as they did in 1970 http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

We can see fun food trends emerge in the data:

Rise of Italian cheese thanks to our love of pizza
Bagels’ emergence from regional-food status (cream cheese)
The rising popularity of Mexican food http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

But as cheese can be stored for longer, it’s also something that’s made when dairies have more milk than they know what to do with, resulting in the infamous “cheese mountain” that is occasionally reduced in size by big government purchases http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

Those have been especially big this year, with the Agriculture Department so far delivering more than 118 million food boxes — each containing several pounds of dairy products, mainly cheese — to food banks and other charities as part of relief efforts http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

The U.S. has also found new things to sell, and new places to sell them. It now exports a fair amount of cheese, and plenty of cheese-making byproducts (think whey powder), mainly to:

Mexico
Japan
South Korea
http://trib.al/TSszFD4 

So, now we’ve established that the dairy industry is going strong, how do you like your butter? http://trib.al/TSszFD4