Rising butter prices give European consumers and bakers a bad taste
Creamy, delectable – and pricey
PARIS — Pastry chef Arnaud Delmontel rolls out dough for croissants and pain au chocolat that later emerge golden and fragrant from the oven in his Paris patisserie.
The price for the butter so essential to the pastries has shot up in recent months, by 25% since September alone, Delmontel says. But he is refusing to follow some competitors who have started making their croissants with margarine.
“It’s a distortion of what a croissant is,” Delmontel said. «A croissant is made with butter.”
One of life’s little pleasures — butter spread onto warm bread or imbuing cakes and seared meats with its rich flavor — has gotten more expensive across Europe in the last year. After a stretch of post-pandemic inflation that the war in Ukraine worsened, the booming cost of butter is another blow for consumers with holiday treats to bake.
Across the 27-member European Union, the price of butter rose 19% on average from October 2023 to October 2024, including by 49% in Slovakia, and 40% in Germany and the Czech Republic, according to figures provided to The Associated Press by the EU's executive arm. Reports from individual countries indicate the cost has continued to go up in the months since.
In Germany, a 250-gram (8.8-ounce) block of butter now generally costs between 2.40 and 4 euros ($2.49-$4.15), depending on the brand and quality.
The increase is the result of a global shortage of milk caused by declining production, including in the United States and New Zealand, one of the world’s largest butter exporters, according to economist Mariusz Dziwulski, a food and agricultural market analyst at PKO Bank Polski in Warsaw.
European butter typically has a higher fat content than the butter sold in the
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