Big Dairy Is Thrilled With Your Butter Board

Not too long ago, "butter board" recipes and how-tos were all the rage on social media. Not surprisingly, the dairy industry was pretty happy about this sudden love of butter. What may be a bit more surprising is that the industry itself played a big role in helping butter boards capture the zeitgeist, writes H. Claire Brown at Grist. The marketing group Dairy Management Inc.—which is funded by mandated fees collected from farmers—has even been boasting about its strategy of paying chefs and influencers to push boards in industry press. The story takes a broader look not just at this campaign but at how the industry's PR machine has gotten a "second wind" roughly three decades after its "era-defining 'Got Milk?' campaign," writes Brown. The results, however, are not making everybody happy, including some dairy farmers.

The story notes how hundreds of celebrities including Emily Ratajkowski, Kelly Ripa, Aubrey Plaza, and Brian Baumgartner of The Office are getting paid to push dairy products on social media, while the industry works with chains from McDonald's to Taco Bell to ramp up dairy on the menu. The push appears to be working: US per-capita dairy consumption hit an all-time high in 2021, even if consumption of "fluid milk" continues to decline. The downside? As "dairy consumption and production continue to grow, so too does the industry's environmental footprint," writes Brown. (Methane is a particular concern.) What's more, "it's not entirely clear that all these efforts are helping the average dairy farmer," with many small and mid-sized farms disappearing as outfits with 2,000 cows or more take up an increasingly large swath of the market. (Read the full story, which explores all of this and more.)