Flaky, funky-looking blocks from Pams have some consumers crying foul. What’s going on?
In case you missed the many, many news stories and numerous explainers, butter’s expensive. With 500g blocks currently retailing between $8.49 and $11 (they’ve nearly doubled in price, amid bumper farm-gate milk prices), the stakes are high if anything goes awry. Which, judging by recent complaints, it might have.
Allegations have been made on various online platforms that some blocks of Pams butter are flaky in texture, peeling off when spread on toast, and separating when creamed. Shoppers have aired grievances on Reddit and Facebook, claiming their butter had a “soft and watery” texture and was going off faster than usual. Pams butter sold at New World Westend in Rotorua allegedly had mould and was recalled. Just this morning, the Herald has reported that the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) is investigating a report that a mouldy block of Pams butter was sold at New World Whangaparāoa. Is this an isolated issue? And what even causes something like this? Let’s get stuck in.
OK, what’s going on?
New Plymouth baker Abbey Macfie has been baking for 11 years (including a cake business and commercial recipe development) and makes buttercream weekly for cake orders. She was making Italian meringue buttercream icing a couple of months ago when she noticed it was separating on the cake, and wiped away as she smoothed it. “That’s not normal. In all my years I’ve never had it happen. I just couldn’t figure it out.” Later, when buttering toast for her son, she experienced a similar thing with a “slimy, separating” texture. “It’s the butter,” she thought, and inspected her block, which appeared visibly flaky. “The stuff I’ve got is, like, peeling away, and it’s got little pockets of water in it.” It also felt softer than usual, even straight out of the fridge.
Photos of Abbey Macfie’s butter, which appeared flaky and crumbly.
She’d been using Pams butter at home (due to it being more affordable than other brands) for years and hadn’t encountered issues before. “It definitely had been fine, until the last couple of months.” After posting on Instagram about the weird butter, she was inundated with responses and photos from people who had experienced the same problem with the same brand of butter, including failed attempts to cream it. “Everyone said ‘I thought it was just me’,” Macfie explained. “I had a few people reply and say a tried-and-true recipe screwed up.” Some sent her photos that showed water coming out of their butter.
Having alerted Pams, Foodstuffs’ house brand sold at New World, Pak n Save and Four Square stores, she heard from the company’s customer service team, who followed up by email, explaining the issue was caused by water migration and quite normal. She was offered a $5 voucher.
Part of Pams’ response to Macfie’s query, which she shared with The Spinoff.
Reddit and Facebook threads from recent months feature similar concerns, with people noticing a “crumbly texture” and complaining about what they believed to be higher-than-usual water content in Pams butter. Some suggested the water content had been “upped”, claiming Pams was “adding water to bulk it up”.
Disgruntled shoppers have shared their theories on Facebook.
What was the official response to all this?
When initially asked about the butter by The Spinoff on Monday, a Foodstuffs spokesperson didn’t acknowledge there was an issue, saying the unusual attributes identified by Macfie and online commenters were due to “occasional variability between batches”. An updated statement was then provided on Tuesday, however: “Recently we’ve identified some quality issues with a few batches of Pams butter. We only want to provide the highest quality butter so have decided to withdraw the affected batches while we look into it.
“We want to reassure customers it’s a quality issue and not a food safety issue. There has been no change to the ingredients in Pams butter. It continues to be made in New Zealand using just cream and salt, with no added water.
“While we aim for consistency, being a natural product there is occasionally variability between batches. If anyone isn’t entirely happy with their butter, they can bring it back to the shop and we’ll swap it for another block.”
Why would a block of butter look like that anyway?
Looking at the photos of Macfie’s butter, Alistair Carr, associate professor in dairy technology at Massey’s School and Food Technology and Natural Sciences, said it appeared atypical. “That’s not normal at all,” he told The Spinoff. “And you know it’s not normal because if every single Pams block of butter looked like that, it would be everywhere, everyone would be complaining.”
He thought it could be an issue with how the butter was made. Judging from the photos, Carr said, “It needs more working, because you’ve got the granules.” Granules of fat form naturally during the production process, a result of the cream being beaten, he explained: fat droplets destabilise, aggregate together and form little granules. Normally, there’s a release of liquid (buttermilk) and the butter is worked to distribute the remaining water into small droplets, with a cohesive structure being formed by a portion of crystalline fat and a portion of liquid, most of which crystallises at cold temperatures. Carr said the butter should be “homogenous to look at” – water shouldn’t be visible.
Butter is tightly regulated in New Zealand, and any block leaving the factory passes through “very, very robust” product release criteria, including moisture content, said Carr. Occasionally though, there may be sampling issues, or part of a batch is exposed to slightly different mixing. “It could be a tiny, tiny portion that’s potentially out of spec” and not representative of the whole. A defect like Macfie found would be “incredibly rare” and tricky to troubleshoot or observe. “They’ll have fun in the factory working out what caused it.”
OK, but what even is water migration?
Visible water droplets don’t necessarily indicate a higher water content. Carr said there could be “micro movements” over a block’s shelf life where fat crystals push things that are not part of the crystal out of the way, including water droplets. These will join together with other water droplets to form a larger droplet.
Temperature fluctuations also cause water migration – like on-off cycling of refrigeration systems, or too long spent in a trolley – and according to Carr even half a degree can change the proportion of liquid and solid fat. Ever noticed beads of water on your butter block after it’s been sitting out on the bench? That’s water migration to the surface. It can happen inside a block too, which is what people have been noticing.
Minimising this is down to the manufacturing process. “If you want a product that’s going to be more resistant to those temperature cycles, then you want to make sure you’ve worked it more,” says Carr. The more the cream is worked, ie churned (which depends on manufacturing time, equipment and batch sizes), the smaller the water droplets, which makes the butter more stable against moisture migration.
Photos sent to Abbey Macfie by other bakers show excess liquid when creaming the butter with sugar.
Wait, what’s actually in butter anyway?
Pasteurised cream (milk) and, if it’s salted butter, salt. The only exception to this is cultured butters, like Lewis Road, to which lactic cultures are added. “Legally the milk fat content of butter has to exceed 80%,” said Carr.“The water portion comes directly from the original milk.” Do manufacturers add any extra? “No they don’t.”
There can be natural changes to butter due to what the cows are eating changing the milk fat composition, however. “Different fats have different melting points,” said Carr. “There’s lots and lots of fatty acids that are present, and they all derive, in part, from the feed that the animals have. So as the grass composition changes, that will then impact the fatty acid composition.”
Seasonal variation data measures the solid fat content in milk. “It increases over the summer months, between November and February, and then it starts decreasing. So butter made at the moment is going to be slightly softer than it would be in December-January.”
What herds eat is dictated by climate and the environment. “If you’re in the middle of a drought and you’ve got no grass, you’ll have to feed them something else.” In New Zealand, there are now limits on how much PKE (a supplementary feed that’s a byproduct of palm oil extraction) can be used. “Because it will actually change the fat profile.”
What about the mould?
That could be related to moisture migration. If water travels to the surface of the butter, Carr said that’s when you’ll get the environmental conditions for mould spores to live and grow. “Migration of water to the surface is dependent on how butter has been treated – in the home, in the car.” Leaving butter on the bench before it goes back in the fridge, for example, increases the chance of water migration, which increases the chance of oxidation or mould.
Butter’s expensive! Is there really a difference between brands?
All those near-identical blocks, regardless of label names, look more or less the same. Some people swear by fancy foil-wrapped brands, others insist the cheap ones are just as good. Is there really any difference?
Packaging does play a part, said Carr. Blocks wrapped in foil limit light and oxygen from entering, both of which cause oxidation of the butter. “Most people’s fridges are pretty dark, so the only time it’s getting exposed to light is on supermarket shelves,” says Carr. “The other difference is parchment is permeable to water, so if you are having water migration, then the water can actually leave the surface of the butter.”
Where you’ll find some difference is with specialist commercial butter, used for baking laminated pastries like croissants, which has a higher fat content. This is achieved through the mixing and cooling process.
In the EU, butterfat ratios for unsalted blocks are higher than here, between 82% and 90%.
But when it comes to New Zealand supermarket brands, inside they’re all pretty similar. “There could be differences around the micro structure, like how well they’ve been worked,” says Carr. Consulting the nutritional information panel is where you can see minor differences, like ratios of protein to sodium, but compositionally there’s not a lot of difference between each brand. While the ratio of milk fat in butter can vary from brand to brand, Carr says it’s fairly minor, between 81.4% and 82%, and stock-standard supermarket butters are all “more or less the same”.