You butter not cry: High cost of key holiday baking ingredient a test for bakers

As home bakers and professionals prepare for the holiday season, they're running into higher costs for all sorts of ingredients, including sky-high prices for a brick of butter. 

According to Statistics Canada, the average retail price for 454 grams (one pound) of butter in 2019 was just over $4. 

This climbed to almost $6 in 2023. It's down slightly from the 2023 peak now, with the average retail price in August reported at $5.76 a pound. A search of Ontario grocery store websites shows prices for a pound of butter are now between $6 and $9, depending on the brand. 

Any way you spread it, butter — an essential ingredient of most baked goods — is a pricey product. There's even been a few butter thefts from grocery stores recently in Ontario. 

Two bakers who spoke to CBC News explained how they're now having to sharpen their spatulas to scrape out a profit from every cookie without spiking the price for the customer. 

Creative work to control costs

A.J. O'Connor, owner of Lynn's Bakery on Dundas Street East in London, Ont., is managing to work through the high butter prices — but admits it's a challenge. 

He's paying about $7 per pound for butter from his supplier. 

His shortbread recipe, which makes 40 dozen cookies, calls for 13 pounds of the yellow gold. It adds up, especially when he was paying $4 per pound pre-pandemic. 

"It's gone up significantly, as everything has," he said. "This time of year with all the seasonal products that require butter, it's played a huge role in pricing." 

O'Connor said the high butter cost has forced him to seek savings and find efficiencies elsewhere to curtail price increases. 

He said there are butter substitutes available, such as blends of shortening and margarine, but O'Connor said they often don't measure up. 

"If you replace anything in baking with something else, you're going to get a different result," he said. "All-butter shortbread cookies have to have butter, all-butter croissants have to have butter. As soon as you start playing with that, you're not going to get the quality of product that everyone is familiar with." 

O'Connor said other ingredients have come down in price a bit, allowing him to keep the cost of cookies and other products about the same this year.

No substitutes and a good supplier 

Tracie Aarts owns the Old North Sconery on Cheapside Street in London and said butter goes into about 90 per cent of the products she sells. 

"It's gone up by leaps and bounds some years," she said. "There's inflation, and then there's butter."

She paid $4.25 per pound when she started her baking business at another location in 2020. Now she's paying about $6.50 a pound. 

Aarts says she can't just add that cost increase onto the price. 

"Per cookie, we can't all of a sudden double the price," she said. "So our profit margin has gone down." 

Like O'Connor, Aarts said she won't consider a butter substitute because she wants to maintain the high quality of the end product. 

"Baking is a science and the texture that you'd lose would not be worth it," she said. "It's the taste and texture but also the quality of the product. If you switch from butter you're losing taste and adding a whole bunch of additives and hydrogenated oils." 

Instead, Aarts looks to find efficiencies elsewhere, everything from the baking process to how products are stored. 

Also, her relationship with her butter supplier is critical. She goes through about 160 pounds of butter a week, and says she seeks volume discounts when she orders extra.

"If I go up in the amount I order, I bug him about the price and say, 'Hey, I'm going through this much more, what's the deal I'm going to get now?'"