I hate wasting food even in my own household, so I hope that this amount of butter can at least be sold to bakeries or food factories instead of being thrown away, because they most definitely know that butter comes from milk.
My guess is that a label could just be added to the existing packaging, or at worst, the butter repackaged correctly. No need to dispose of any of it.
Will depend on the best before date and if the process of relabeling or repackaging will take too long to make the sale of the butter still economical. For me a pack of butter (250g here) lasts for 4-6 weeks (I keep it in my fridge), and I’ve never had butter gone bad.
80,000 lbs of butter is about one truckload. A tiny drop in the bucket of the butter Costco sells every day.
US butter production is on the order of 175 million pounds per month.
Trying to figure out some way to reuse this stuff is literally the same as a home cook trying to figure out how to reuse a couple teaspoons of milk that got spilled on the floor.
For an outfit as big as Costco, the effort to find an alternate distribution channel exceeds the value of the product. If Costco already has a pure wholesale division that sells to big food factories like bakeries or such, then diverting the butter into those channels might make sense. If tht commercial e.g. bakery wants to deal with unwrapping butter one 1/4th lb stick at a time when they’re used to buying it in 500 lb heavy plastic sacks that connect directly into the input spigot of their butter extruding machine.
Yeah, I see that, but it still irks me to see that much food wasted for such a petty reason. I was raised this way.
I’d be interested to know how a major supplier suddenly lost the word “milk.” were they re-doing the labels? Changed label company?
Here in the USA I’ve seen estimates that well over half of all food grown / made is wasted somewhere along the way.
This butter is spittin’ in a hurricane we’re so used to being in the middle of that we don’t even notice it.
Yeah, I know, I know, but that’s very sad.
Do we know what they’re actually doing with it? If the retailers were told to dispose of it on their own, they may have donated or sold it to places that could still use it. The incorrect label isn’t going to make a difference to people that won’t sell it to the end user in that packaging. Bakeries, restaurants etc. Even food manufacturers might be willing to take some of it. Pound for pound, it’s probably cheaper to pay someone to unwrap free/cheap butter than buy it. Anyone that runs a kitchen or pantry for the homeless can probably also use it.
These hypotheticals don’t make a lot of practical sense.
If it’s butter that’s sitting on shelves, sure, do some good with it.
But this stuff had ‘best by’ dates from late February to late March, i.e. sold a couple months ago at best, if not longer. It’s not currently sitting on store shelves, and re-distributing dairy products you got back from customers who bought it a couple months ago is one stupid, stupid idea.
That’s an easy one. Call the dog (or cat). It will get “used” faster than you can get the sponge.
I hadn’t heard that the butter would be “wasted” so let’s hold judgment on that for now. And I Googled for the details on the recall; several lots are being recalled with the earliest “best by” date of Feb 22, 2025.
Certainly a bad idea to try to re-distribute anything perishable that came back from customers; becuse there’s no way to tell how any individual customer may have (mis)handled the stuff.
However, for whatever portion of this has already been bought by individual customers: I expect there’s a sizeable portion of them who, once they find out why it’s recalled, will just go ahead and use the butter. I certainly would. (A recall for contamination with something that shouldn’t be in butter would be different.)
It’s imported from Ireland and costs a pretty penny, but if you ever need really good butter for something, it’s worth it.
(It’s so good they were smuggling it into Wisconsin.)
FYI I read someplace that the recalled lots were mostly shipped to Texas so most Costco stores should still have the same butter.
Very much like a pack of peanuts has the disclaimer ‘May contain peanuts’
There’s a particular list of about a dozen common allergens that FDA has decreed must be called out separately from mere mention in the ingredient list.
They all take the form of CONTAINS MILK / PEANUTS / WHATEVER in plain block bold print. Or the “May contain” verbiage for the case of shared machinery in a manufacturing / packaging plant.
Lotta folks can’t read ingredient lists. Too old & farsighted, too English-limited, etc. The idea is to make the “if you’re allergic, don’t eat this or you might die” level warnings obvious to all of us, not just the best educated / most American / non-elderly 90% of us. And only using very simply vocabulary and no hiding e.g. sugar under weasel words like “maltodextrin”. Gotta use the basic common noun no matter how indirectly your product contains that stuff.
Makes enough sense to me.
Don’t worry, it won’t matter soon after RFK is in charge of health and all that silliness about knowing ingredients is swept away.
Americans will drop like flies…
I’ve also seen things like “Manufactured on equipment that processes products containing milk.”
I think that means the same as “may contain traces of X”.