We investigate palm oil, animal rights, packaging and climate actions being taking by butter brands, shine a spotlight on Kerrygold, and give our recommended buys.
This is a shopping guide from Ethical Consumer, the UK's leading alternative consumer organisation. Since 1989 we've been researching and recording the social and environmental records of companies, and making the results available to you in a simple format.
What to look for when buying butter, margarine or a spread:
Is it organic? Organic certification ensures that plants are grown without synthetic pesticides and herbicides. For animal-derived spreads, certification ensures better animal welfare.
Is it vegan? The dairy industry is responsible for 3.4% of global CO2 equivalent emissions, almost double that of aviation (1.9%). Opt for plant-based spreads.
What to avoid when buying butter, margarine or a spread:
Is it dairy butter? Dairy butter has a 3x larger carbon impact than plant-based spreads. Choose a vegan option.
Does it contain uncertified palm oil? The palm oil industry is driving the destruction of vast swathes of tropical rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia. Buying uncertified palm oil supports this practice. Look for companies that are palm oil free, or source only certified palm oil.
| Brand | Score(out of 100) | Ratings Categories | |
|---|---|---|---|
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This ethical shopping guide covers butter, margarine and spreads, including vegan non-dairy alternatives.
We review and rate supermarket own-brands, popular well-known brands and companies like Flora and Utterly Butterly, along with small independent vegan, vegetarian and organic dairy brands.
We look at issues including palm oil, health debates, and the expansion of plant-based alternatives.
Margarine is generally derived from plant-based oils and often goes through a process of hydrogenation to turn those liquid fats solid. Margarine contains between 80%-90% fat, whilst a spread is a blend of plant and/or animal fats with a fat content that is less than 80%.
Margarine and spreads are not necessarily vegan, with many (especially spreads) containing buttermilk for flavour. So always check the label if you are wanting to avoid dairy.
Humans have been churning cream into butter for at least 4000 years. One theory is that butter has its roots in the repetitive sloshing of bags of milk on the long horseback journeys of Eurasian nomads. Nowadays butter is technically defined by its 80-90% milk-fat content, although its original nomadic inventors were perhaps less particular.
Butter’s hegemony spread widely and went unchallenged for most of human history until 1869, when the French Emperor Napoleon III demanded a butter substitute for the armed forces and lower classes. The chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès dutifully obliged by inventing margarine.
Second World War era rationing made margarine a staple food among all social classes, yet retained an association with inferiority, poverty, and fakeness. In the words of food historian Alysa Levene, margarine became “a vehicle for class racism”.
Yet emerging links between saturated fat and cardiovascular diseases led to a margarine renaissance in the 1960s and 1970s. The poor man's butter was becoming the healthy man’s butter, and margarine companies were quick to capitalise. Enter a whole host of brands boasting all the flavours of butter without the health risks and hefty price tag – “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter”, “Utterly Butterly”, etc. ad nauseam.
Westerners were increasingly replacing butter’s saturated fats with margarine’s polyunsaturated fatty acids, but the process to make polyunsaturated fat spreadable – as needed for margarine and spreads – involves partial hydrogenation: a process that creates trans fats, discovered in the 1990s to be worse for you than saturated fat.
Nowadays, some newer margarines and spreads are low in saturated fat, high in unsaturated fat, and free of trans fats altogether. And, for extra confusion, the whole idea that low-fat diets can reduce heart disease at all is increasingly facing scrutiny. In fact, large trials have shown the opposite effects of a diet high in certain high-fat foods such as nuts and extra virgin olive oil, which are both high in polyunsaturated fat.
So really, the butter vs marg vs spread question is a false comparison, as it depends on which brand you’re talking about. And, importantly, the healthiness of a given food is determined by much more than just its fat content.
The dairy industry has been devoting significant resources to fighting plant-based alternatives since margarine’s emergence in the late 19th century. This was not exactly an early form of vegan shaming, but there are some interesting facets of the industry’s strategy that echo modern-day discourse.
The historian Gerry Strey writes about the US’ response to margarine in her book, Oleo Wars: Wisconsin’s Fight Over the Demon Spread, where she examines the dairy industry and its political allies’ attempts to stoke fears about marg, portraying it as a fraudulent abomination that was deceiving and harming customers and threatening traditional ways of life. Governor Hubbard of Minnesota meanwhile went as far as to say that “the ingenuity of depraved human genius has culminated in the production of margarine.”
The US dairy industry even portrayed ‘imitation butter’ as the product of unsanitary factory conditions, despite the fact that the dairy industry, even back then, was increasingly keeping cows in crowded, filthy stables that bred disease.
Fast-forward to 2013 and the EU bans most plant-based foods from using terms such as milk, butter and cheese on the basis of this “misleading consumers”.
Plus ça change …
In 2023, Upfield, which owns Flora, announced that its new Flora recipes were once again entirely vegan. The company had previously reintroduced buttermilk into Flora Buttery, due to apparent customer preference for its “familiar buttery taste”, resulting in a 10% dairy content and complaints from vegan consumers. A petition with 16,000 signatures urged Upfield to reconsider, and the brand has now reverted to its vegan formula in all new Flora product lines.
The move was accompanied by an advertising campaign encouraging consumers to “skip the cow”, which queries the perceived normality of dairy by asking questions like “is udder butter a bit weird?” Perhaps Upfield could put that question to another of its fully-owned spread brands, Bertolli, which is still very much made with udder buttermilk?
In fairness to Upfield, the company is aiming for a 100% plant-based portfolio by 2030 and, in 2024, dairy only represented 1% of its ingredients company-wide. We awarded marks for this under the animal products category but noted that the company had minimal policies covering its remaining dairy products, so it scored less well under dairy welfare.
What are the butter spreads and margarine options for vegetarians (who eat dairy products), people who are dairy-intolerant, and for vegans who avoid all animal products?
The vast majority of butters, spreads and margarines are vegetarian, and will be labelled as such. If it doesn’t say vegetarian on the packet, and lists unfamiliar ingredients, it’s probably worth doing some research or picking a different brand.
If it has lard in it, it's not vegetarian. Lard is fat from a pig.
If you're looking for vegan butter or margarine there are some brands that are completely vegan and which have no animal products within the company group.
Fully vegan companies:
Vegetarian companies with vegan butter/margarine:
There are a number of other vegan brands of butter and margarine which are owned by non-vegan companies including:
Naturli’s sustainability-inclined branding invites consumers to “Eat plants – There is no planet B”. But other companies owned by its parent Orkla include the meat-heavy, ultra processed fast food brand Big One Diner. What was that about a planet B again?
In addition, some supermarkets have an own-brand spread which may be vegan e.g. Co-op's Honest Value vegan spread.
It is difficult to gain an accurate picture of what life is like for dairy cows – small farmers, large-scale industrial farmers and animal rights activists will all have different views and descriptions.
Our separate article on animal welfare in the dairy industry highlights issues such as very early separation of calf from mother (so that the milk can be used for humans, not the calf), dehorning, forced impregnation, intensive milking, potentially lack of access to outdoor grazing, diseases, and early slaughter before end of natural life span.
These issues, some of which also apply to sheep and goats, explain why we mark companies down under the animal category for their use of dairy products.
Alongside animal welfare issues, livestock farming carries additional climate concerns.
A 2020 large-scale life cycle analysis found that plant-based spreads have lower climate, water, and land impacts than butter, despite variability in product recipes and geographies.
Dairy is simply an incredibly carbon-intensive industry, and we therefore expected any dairy producing companies to provide extensive detail about how they were reducing the emissions from cows and their feed in order to receive the highest marks under the climate category. This information was lacking across the board, and no dairy producer scored above 20/100 in the rating.
Lowest performers for our agriculture rating included Saputo Inc, whose UK subsidiary (Dairy Crest) faced a record £1.5 million fine in 2022 for environmental offences including “coating the River Inny with a noxious, black sludge for 5 kilometres in 2018, through a release of a mass of suspended solids in July and August 2018.”
Especially if you are buying dairy butter or margarine, organic versions ensure better welfare standards for the animals, as well as for the environment.
Our agriculture rating awarded 80 marks (out of 100) to companies that were fully organic certified. Organic farming uses no artificial fertilisers and fewer pesticides than conventional methods, and long-term comparison studies have found that soils in organic farms store more carbon and have higher levels of soil microorganisms than those in conventional farming systems.
Organic certifications also provide animal welfare guarantees. Our dairy milk guide has more information about animal welfare issues.
Extra marks were available for companies that incorporated certain methods that go beyond standard organic practice, such as agroforestry projects. As a result, Abel & Cole and Daylesford both received 100 points under agriculture.
Fully organic companies in this guide are:
Yeo Valley is also an organic brand, but its butter, cheese, and milk has actually been produced under organic conditions by the multinational dairy giant Arla since 2018.
Organic butter and margarine spreads by non-organic companies
Some other brands in our guide sell organic butters and spreads alongside non-organic versions and other non-organic products e.g. Co-op, Naturli', and Suma.
When it comes to concern about salt, butter hogs the spotlight, perhaps unsurprisingly given ‘salted/unsalted’ labelling conventions. Margarine and spreads deserve a closer look, however.
Action on Salt made headlines in 2013 upon finding that many spreads and margarines had higher salt contents than salted butter. One brand, the now discontinued Weight Watchers Dairy Spread, had more salt per serving than a packet of Walkers’ ready salted crisps (2.5g per 100g).
Low-fat alternatives are often saltier, so it's worth bearing these trade-offs in mind.
Heavily salted spreads can be more easily avoided if you stop pursuing a perfect reproduction of dairy butter’s taste and texture profile and opt for a nut spread instead. Mouse’s Favourite cashew nut butter (Vegan Gold) is lightly salted in flavour, but contains just 0.6g per 100g, while Tiana’s spreadable coconut butter contains no salt at all.
While butter is considered a ‘processed culinary ingredient’, margarine is an ultra-processed food according to most classification systems. The jury is out on whether all ‘ultra-processed’ food is necessarily synonymous with ‘health risk’, and spreads vary heavily in their level of processing. There are barely processed plant-based spreads available (e.g. Tiana), but margarines typically contain plenty of flavouring agents, yellow food pigments, emulsifiers, preservatives, and added vitamins.
Kerry Group, which owns the Pure Dairy Free brand, appears to lean particularly heavily into processing. Kerry is one of Ireland’s biggest dairy and nutrition companies and is consistently ranked as one of the largest food additive and preservative producers in the world. The company lists “the current media attention on ultra-processed foods” as an “emerging risk” in its 2023 strategic report.
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You may have a favourite brand of butter or margarine spread and hate a different one, but did you know many of them are owned by a few big international companies?
Despite not committing to paying supply chain workers a living wage, KKR paid a massive $49,959,449 (£38.9m) to one of its directors in 2023.
In the infographic below, we compare Flora and Utterly Butterly on some of the key ethical issues to see how they rate against each other.
Margarine and spreads played an important role in the story of palm oil because, unlike other hydrogenated oils, palm doesn’t contain trans fats. Introducing palm oil into recipes allowed spread companies to market healthier products throughout the 1990s, but at a heavy cost to the health of the planet.
Palm oil is something of an easy bogeyman for ethically minded shoppers, with palm oil producers levelling millions of hectares of forest across Southeast Asia. In doing so, these companies ticked every unethical box, fuelling climate change, biodiversity loss, and becoming a hotbed for human rights violations.
Many sustainability-conscious companies dropped palm oil completely as consumers’ ethical palm qualms grew, but finding a scalable ethical replacement is not simple. The issues with palm oil are not inherent to the palm plant itself, but rather the way it is grown and the land cleared to facilitate production.
Some palm alternatives are far less efficient in agricultural terms: a hectare of land can produce just 0.7 tonnes of sunflower oil annually compared to 3.8 tonnes of palm oil. A mass shift away from palm oil to sunflower oil might not be viable if scaled up.
Some ethical consumers prefer to avoid palm oil given the number of problems associated with palm fat production.
The following companies are fully palm oil free:
We have criticised the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for multiple reasons over the years, including over allegations of weak auditing and for being slow to penalise rule-breaking members in a number of high-profile cases.
But we also recognise the RSPO as the best available large-scale palm certification, and – as to not make the perfect the enemy of the good – have awarded marks to companies that only use certified palm, and more marks to those that use only the more rigorous ‘segregated’ or ‘identity preserved’ certifications.
In this guide, of the companies using palm oil, only Kerry Group, Iceland and Groupe Lactalis are not 100% RSPO certified. Iceland became palm oil free, but it was reintroduced for some products as a result of Russia's invasion of, although there is no information on certification.
Although the RSPO's role in this matter remains hotly debated, the rate of deforestation caused by the palm oil industry has decreased almost every year over the past decade in Indonesia, the world's leading producer. And, in the past ten years, deforestation monitoring technologies like satellite imagery have significantly improved, enabling watchdog groups to better hold palm oil companies to account.
“We can now see deforestation in near-real time,” said David Gaveau, a landscape ecologist at TheTreeMap and lead author of a 2022 paper on palm-driven deforestation. “It’s not the wild west it used to be.”
Oddly enough, the production of palm oil’s coconut-derived cousin does remain something of a wild west.
Coconut oil is often touted as a sustainable palm alternative, yet it lacks a globally recognised set of sustainability standards and enforcement mechanism like the RSPO.
While coconut palms present a less dire biodiversity threat than oil palms (they are generally grown alongside other crops like banana and cacao rather than in mass monocultures) there is still little to stop producers demolishing the surrounding tropical landscapes to further expand production.
A 2020 PETA exposé also found that rampant abuse of primates is still going unchecked in coconut oil supply chains in Thailand. This “forced monkey labour” generally involves macaques being illegally obtained, chained, and forced to pick coconuts for suppliers linked to dozens of top coconut milk brands.
PETA alleged that Thai coconut industry insiders are deliberately hiding forced monkey labour in their supply chains and recommend that consumers avoid all coconut products from the country.
Of the companies that produced coconut products in this guide, the following had policies prohibiting the use of monkeys in their own-brand products: Biona, Koko, Naturli’, Suma, Tiana, and all the major UK supermarkets.
The following companies are fully free from GMOs (genetically modified organisms) meaning modified ingredients are not present in their products or, if applicable, in their animal feed. These companies received extra marks under Agriculture.
None of the major UK supermarkets use GMO ingredients in their own-brand products, but they do not guarantee that they will not be present in animal feedstocks for their non-organic product lines.
Other companies, for example Saputo, are more outwardly positive about the use of biotechnology, including GMOs, to produce “more and better food by influencing or improving natural processes”, and emphasise that there is no evidence that genetically modified DNA can be found in the milk of cows fed with GMO feed.
Read an article about GMOs and future changes in the UK which may lead to unlabelled GMOs in our food chain.
Plastic tubs have long been the norm for supermarket spreads, while butter often arrives wrapped in a non-recyclable combination of aluminium and greaseproof paper bonded together with plastic. Ethical alternatives are a little more imaginative, with Tiana’s products coming in glass jars and Mouse’s Favourite in a home-compostable and biodegradable vacuum bag.
We are also seeing improvements among some of the major brands.
Upfield, which owns Flora, has begun transitioning to paper packaging across its portfolio, and claimed earlier this year to have developed the world’s first plastic-free recyclable spread tub. And Aldi has started introducing recyclable paper wrappings for its butter.
Find out the problems and solutions to plastic in our separate article.
There are plenty of recipes online for making your own butter, both vegan butter/spread and dairy recipes.
If the internet is to be believed, vegan spreads can be ‘churned’ out in just 10 minutes due to the lack of actual churning that is required to produce dairy butters.
The price of butter has risen steadily in recent years, with an 18.5% increase recorded in the EU wholesale market between 2023 and 2024. The spiralling cost of Lurpak made headlines during the 2022/23 cost-of-living crisis, with supermarkets putting security tags on its 750g tubs priced at £7 to deter potential shoplifters.
These price rises were due to a confluence of factors, but the dairy industry was hit particularly hard by a spike in energy and fertiliser prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Many vegan spreads are now the cheaper option, with the Co-op’s decent-scoring ‘Honest Value spread’ costing just 95p for 500g.
Although you can expect to pay considerably more for the fully organic most ethical options (e.g. Tiana’s spreadable vegan butter and Mouse’s Favourite ‘Vegan Gold’ both come in at £4.99 for 150g and 180g packages respectively, as of July 2024), avoiding the worst ethical offenders needn’t break the bank. For example, Suma produces a vegan soya based spread, of which a 500g tub will set you back just £2.35.
Around half of the companies in the guide received 0 marks in our tax conduct category. The margarine and spreads market is dominated by large multinationals, the vast majority of which had a presence in tax havens that we deemed to be high risk for tax avoidance.
Attention was once again drawn to Saputo Inc. in November last year after it was named as one of many Canadian companies alleged to have collectively funnelled Canadian $119.8 billion in net profits through Luxembourg, a tax haven, over the last ten years.
The [O] in the scoretable indicates an organic product; [Vg] indicates a vegan product.
| This guide appeared in Ethical Consumer Magazine 210. |
The Kerrygold brand is owned by Ornua, a €2.3 billion Irish agricultural cooperative.
Kerrygold butter is a common enough sight in UK supermarkets, but is the 2nd best selling brand in the US. Its US advertising makes a big deal of its “grassfed cows”, conjuring images of Irish pastoral tranquillity that contrast with notions of US corporate mass production.
In reality this appears to lack substance, with the company scoring 0 in our agriculture and dairy welfare categories. At the time of most recent check (August 2024), Ornua had a link on its website titled “our responsible approach”, but the linked page simply apologised that “the page you were trying to view does not exist” – maybe something of a Freudian slip on the part of its web editor.
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The abbreviations in the score table mean the product gets a sustainability point for: [O] = organic, [F] = Fairtrade, [Vg] = vegan.
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