Meet the Underground Network of Butter Bargain Hunters

Word oozed out earlier this month. The news quickly spread. Worries softened. Aldi supermarket had lowered the price of butter.

“Everyone was abuzz,” says Laura Magone, who moderates the Wedding Cookie Table Community Facebook page, where the butter deal was the big talk among bakers who share recipes and cooking tips.

Some of her 111,000 members posted images of the Aldi weekly circulars showing butter selling for $2.49 a pound in their area followed by “Woohoo!” Lines were reported in Boardman, Ohio. “There was no butter in Painesville, Ohio, this morning,” one baker declared. In Daytona Beach, the sale price was $2.99, noted another. Several offered ways to get around the six-pounds-of butter-per-person limits. “Took three buddies and got 24 pounds.”

The coming holidays and near record high butter prices have churned up an underground butter brigade. People who love to bake are scouting national, regional and local stores across the country and sharing butter deals with fellow spritz and snickerdoodle makers on social media. They post photos of store shelves with prices listed and kitchen counters piled with their latest hauls. One made a butter Jenga.

“People are passionate about butter,” says Ms. Magone, of Pittsburgh. The wedding cookie table members are generous, she says, offering advice on baking, freezing butter, making butter and ways to stretch every bit of butter. One tip: freeze butter wrappers and use them to grease cookie sheet pans.

Ms. Magone posted a recipe for a raisin bar cookie, called poor man’s cookie, on the page. It doesn’t call for butter.

Many tips center on butter, but members also post egg and nut deals. One found walnuts at a small store in northwest Pennsylvania for $2.43 a pound, adding “They are really fresh, too!”

Aldi rolled back prices to 2019 levels on dozens of products, including baking ingredients such as pecans and marshmallows, as part of its Thanksgiving Price Rewind program. Butter wasn’t included.

“While butter is not part of our rewind program, we know it is a key baking ingredient, which is why we have increased our supply to meet the holiday demand,” says Scott Patton, vice president of national buying at Aldi U.S. Butter prices vary by location, he said.

Bob Cropp, who writes a column for the Cheese Reporter, says prices vary based on competition and regional costs. “I can sometimes buy butter for $1 less at my 7-Eleven than the grocery store,” says Dr. Cropp, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He says butter prices reached record highs in September but are expected to come down by the end of the year. He attributes higher prices to more demand—butter consumption rose to 6.5 pounds per person in 2021, from 5.6 pounds in 2015, he says—and lower supply. Butter inventories in September were down 18% from a year ago, he says, due in part to higher exports and labor shortages as well as our growing appetite for cheese, which uses a lot of milk fat that would otherwise make butter.

Dee Stroup, who won a Pittsburgh Nut Roll Competition in 2019, needs 20 pounds of butter to get through Thanksgiving and Christmas and will only bake with Land O’ Lakes. She checks with her local market and talks often with a wholesaler who supplies restaurants. She stocks up when she gets a deal and posts on the Wedding Cookie Table Community Facebook page. She found butter for $3.88 a pound and issued a dispatch: “LAND O’ LAKES BUTTER ALERT.”

“I try to get the word out to our community,” she says. One woman responded that she went out and bought 13 pounds.

Ms. Stroup also decided to make butter and posted the recipe, a photo of her 3-ounce block and some advice. Her arms grew tired after 10 minutes of shaking heavy cream in a canning jar, so she put it in her mixer, which had a whisk attachment. Seven minutes later, she had butter, which she will use on bread, but not for baking.

Often mentions of deals are coupled with discussion of name brands versus store brands and whether salted or unsalted works best.

“Some people swear by Land O’ Lakes or Kerrygold. I use what I can afford,” says Robin Knox Schreiter, of Lititz, Pa. Ms. Schreiter goes through about 10 pounds to make cookies and another 3 to 4 pounds to make German sweet bread called stollen when her family gets together the first weekend of December. She recently bought her allotted six pounds of Countryside Creamery butter at one Aldi and sent her husband to another to get six more.

Shariann Hall, of Canfield, Ohio, posted about a $2.49 butter sale on the Youngstown Cookie Table Facebook page: “For your holiday baking butter stash!” That prompted responses including one saying the price in Florida is $3.99, followed by an angry-face emoji. Ms. Hall says she started stocking up on butter in September and had about 20 pounds in the fridge.

“My nephew calls my house the house of 2,000 cookies,” she says. “He’s pretty close.”

Beverly Snyder Kundla, of Homer City, Pa., reached out for advice after using lower-priced margarine in a batch of caramel-stuffed snickerdoodles, which came out looking too flat.

“With as many cookies as I’ll make over the next three months, I can’t afford butter on a school secretary’s salary,” says Ms. Kundla. One fellow baker suggested another brand of margarine. A few recommended using half butter, half margarine. Another said she could try making butter. Ms. Kundla responded saying she had looked into that possibility but a quart of cream costs as much as a pound of butter.

Her mother, Anna Mary Snyder, made butter, but had a cow she milked twice a day. Ms. Kundla posted a photo of Anna Mary’s recipe for sugar cookies on the Wedding Cookie Table Community Facebook page. It uses lard, rather than butter.

“I would like to find more recipes with lard,” she says.