Butter Goes Western

News EditorButter, General, Industry News

LOLbutterWell folks, you learn something new everyday. I had no idea that the western part of our country prefer their butter sticks to be short and squat! Land O’Lakes is meeting this demand with their new “stubby” butter!

The new Western-sized butter from Land O’Lakes, which this week is finally changing the shape of its butter sticks – but only for the quirky West Coast market.

One of the regional curiosities of the butter business is that different regions prefer different butter packaging. Midwesterners like their butter in long and slim sticks, stacked two-by-two into a one-pound block. But on the West Coast, the “Western stubby” style is popular. That’s a butter stick only three inches long, but wider, and the sticks are packaged four abreast to make up a pound.

“It’s been the norm in the West for a long, long time,” explained Lydia Botham, a spokesperson for Arden Hills-based Land O’Lakes, which has the nation’s No. 1 brand of butter. Rather than fight regional tastes, Land O’Lakes finally decided, “They like it that way, so let’s do it,” Botham said. The Land O’Lakes Western stubby is now appearing in California and nine other Western states.