Pretoria - A new “spread” has arrived on the market with some fanfare – Flora Buttery. The one in the golden pack.
Decades ago, butter was butter and margarine was margarine. Then the butter makers began adding vegetable oil to the mix, to make it easier to spread, and butter spreads were born.
But adding a dash of butter, or “butteriness”, to a vegetable spread is a new form of hybrid, to the South African market anyway.
“Blended with real buttermilk to give an irresistibly smooth and creamy buttery taste.” That’s what appears on the side of the Buttery pack.
My local Checkers has stacked the Buttery tubs with the butter bricks and the “hybrid” butter spreads, rather than with the rest of the Flora range and its margarine-type competitors, which in itself is telling consumers that the spread is more butter than “margarine”.
To be called a margarine, a product must be 80 percent vegetable oil. If the oil content is less than that, the product must be called a spread. When the price of oil started rocketing a few years ago, many new “spreads” containing less oil and more water entered the market. They aren’t quite as suitable for baking and frying, but they can claim to be less fattening.
Then there’s the heart health issue – saturated (animal) fats versus unsaturated (plant). For years we’ve been told unsaturated fats are better for us than the saturated ones, but recent test results have brought that advice into question.
So, just how buttery is Buttery? The list of ingredients on the bottom of the pack reveals that it contains 60 percent vegetable oils, 38 percent water and 1 percent butterfat powder. Yes, 1 percent.
A brick of butter contains cream, often with a dash of salt. That’s it.
So is that much-hyped smooth and creamy buttery taste coming from the “real buttermilk”, as claimed, or from flavoured vegetable fat?
For that 1 percent of buttermilk powder to impart the buttery taste, it would have to be incredibly potent, surely? That’s what I asked Flora Buttery maker Unilever.
Responding, Flora brand manager Odele Sheik said “buttery” was a descriptive word which “captures more than just taste”.
“It refers to smoothness, softness and texture in the same way as describing something as being ‘rich and creamy’ does not imply it is cream,” she said.
“The formulation of Flora Buttery contains buttermilk powder at 1 percent which, if reconstituted, equates to 10 percent buttermilk. Labelling regulations say we have to declare the ingredient as either buttermilk powder or reconstituted buttermilk powder, as it is reconstituted in the blending process.
“So we could have declared ‘reconstituted buttermilk powder (10 percent)’ but this felt a bit cumbersome on an already long ingredient list.
“While other butter flavours are also used to enhance the butteriness, 10 percent buttermilk is a significant amount in the formulation and we are comfortable with the fact that we are not misleading consumers.”
Flora Buttery was part of a global Unilever project, Sheik said. The product had already been launched in European countries, “and has been well received by consumers”.
The Buttery issue got me wondering what the ratio of cream to vegetable fat is in Clover’s butter spread, Butro. This is not declared on the label or on the company’s website.
Company secretary Jacques van Heerden said Clover said the vegetable fat in Butro was “less than 30 percent of the total fat in Butro”.
“We prefer not to disclose the actual percentages as we deem it to be our intellectual property,” he said.
So it’s safe to say that there’s a big difference between a butter spread and the “Buttery” spread.
Whatever your preference, it’s always good to know what you’re buying.
Here’s how the prices of butter, butter spreads and that “Buttery” spread stacked up in my Checkers this week.
* Flora Buttery, 500g tub: R29.99
* Clover Butro, 500g tub: R35.99
* Ladismith Butter Spread, 500g tub: R33.95
* Clover Mooi River butter, 500g brick: R33.99.
Interestingly, in 2009 the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, acting on 30 complaints, found that a Flora Buttery TV advert featuring celebrity chef Gary Rhodes was misleading, and ordered it to be withdrawn.
In the advert, Rhodes stopped shoppers and asked them to taste two “spreadables” – Flora Buttery and butter spread Lurpak Lighter Spreadable – and say which tasted better.
Of 200 people tested, 48 percent preferred Buttery, 45 percent Lurpak and 7 percent had no preference.
The ASA said that although the survey resulted in 96 out of 200 participants selecting Flora Buttery as their preferred choice, it was concerned that the result was insufficient to support a “preference” claim.
“We noted, of the total number surveyed, the number of those who selected Lurpak Lighter Spreadable or indicated no preference was greater than the number who selected Flora Buttery.
“We considered, therefore, that the results had not demonstrated that more people prefer the taste of Flora Buttery.” - Pretoria News