Food
All in butter: The recipe for success from Ireland
“1.45 million dairy cows in Ireland, and counting”: Dairy farmer Paul Tuomey. Photo: Mareike Graepel/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Irish butter is salty in Ireland, without exception – and it’s world famous. Irish butter is also popular in Germany. What is the secret of the export hit?
Everything is fine for Paul Tuomey. He is one of 18,000 dairy farmers in Ireland and his family has raised cows for generations.
Tuomey points to the pastures behind his home on the outskirts of Gorey in County Wexford, about an hour south of Dublin. “We have almost twice as many cattle as people in Ireland, almost seven million,” he says. “Of these, 1.45 million are dairy cows. Ascending trend.” On average, a farmer has 80 cows.
Butter almost turns the Green Isle into a White Isle. Butter has been made here for 3,500 years. The South West is the most successful because even in the summer months in the province of Munster it remains relatively cool. Cork’s butter market has long been the largest in the world. Today, creameries in smaller towns still sell their butter directly, but large companies such as Kerrygold and Dairygold dominate the international market.
Butter boom 2018
The country last experienced a true butter boom in 2018, with the Irish exporting butter worth more than a billion euros. Ireland is the EU’s leading exporter of butter to third countries, as confirmed by recent figures from the Brussels-based Milk Market Observatory (MMO). By way of comparison, Guinness, Baileys and other Irish drinks were all sold abroad in the same year for a similar sum. Alongside the Netherlands, Ireland is Germany’s most important butter supplier.
“With a market share of more than 15 percent in value terms in the German butter market, we are the market leader,” says Kerrygold’s Marketing Manager Stephen Hurley. “Kerrygold is also the market leader in the mixed fat segment, i.e. butter with rapeseed oil, and cheddar cheese.” In 2020 alone, Ornua Deutschland GmbH, which is 100 percent owned by Ornua Co-operative Ltd. owned, a cooperative of Irish farmers and dairies, produces around 79,000 tonnes of Kerrygold butter and cheese. According to the Irish Farmers Journal, more than 60 percent of households in Germany buy Kerrygold branded products at least once a year.
But what is the recipe for success of Ireland’s butter? There is a museum in Cork about the history and triumph of the dairy product that offers answers to this question. There, visitors learn, for example, that because of the mild climate in Ireland, grass grows almost all year round and does not have to be stored. To date, cattle spend up to 310 days a year in the open air.
The grass does it
Feeding the cow fresh grass makes the butter particularly spreadable, yellow and rich in vitamins. It also contains more unsaturated fatty acids. Because there is more carotene in grass than in fodder maize, and it is naturally interspersed with herbs. In addition, grazing cows are sick less often than their peers who receive concentrated feed and suffer more frequently from torsion of the abomasum. In addition, Irish dairy cows “have to” only give 5,000 liters of milk per year, around 2,000 liters less than high-yielding cows elsewhere.
A special feature is also explained in the butter museum: Irish butter is still salty. “That’s because it was made to last longer before there was any way to refrigerate it,” explains Peter Foynes, head of the museum. “I’ve never eaten unsalted butter.” This has prevailed in the English-speaking world to this day. Manufacturers also sell them in unsalted form in other European countries and the USA. “Butter is a national product, we’re very proud of it,” says Foynes.