Cheese has long been on the shopping list for tourists keen to taste the local cuisine during their visits to France. But these days, wealthy holidaymakers are scrambling to get hold of another dairy product to show off at home: luxury butter.
The appetite for the finest French butter is rising, with sales driven largely by overseas visitors, notably from the United States and Japan.
Artisan butter-makers are struggling to keep up with demand. They say they are unsure why their products have become so fashionable — although the trend apparently took off in the summer of 2024, when English-language videos vaunting the merits of French butter began appearing on TikTok.
La Grande Épicerie, the Left Bank store that is to Paris what Harrods’ food halls are to London, says it sold 19 tonnes of butter last year, a 300 per cent increase on 2023.
“We’ve seen this trend since the Paris 2024 Olympics,” Clémence Le Tannou, purchasing manager at La Grande Épicerie, told Le Parisien newspaper. “We still don’t know how to explain it — probably a TikTok video that went viral.”
A range of butter brands and flavours at La Grande ÉpicerieAlamy
Other upmarket stores, such as Lafayette Gourmet, have recorded increased sales too.
In many luxury food shops, tourists can ask for butters to be vacuum sealed, enabling them to be bought back home as gifts for friends and family.
One of the most popular butter-makers is Maison Bordier in Brittany, whose standard 125-gram slab is on sale for €5.85 at high-end shops in Paris. A truffle-flavoured portion of the same size costs about €16.
The prices may seem high but they are a snip compared with the cost of Bordier’s butter in the US. A cheese store in Beverly Hills has a slightly salted 125g slab on sale at $12; a Madagascan vanilla-flavoured slab costs $22; and in Houston, truffle-flavoured Bordier butter goes for $36 for a 125g slab.
“We were a bit surprised ourselves,” Julie Sugliani, product manager at Bordier, said. She added that it was proving “impossible” to meet the demand for the firm’s butter, which is produced in only limited quantities. The company, which employs about 100 people, said it had no intention of increasing production.
Bordier’s butter is made with milk from cows that have grazed in the fields of Brittany, Normandy and the Loire region. It is churned, kneaded, salted, tapped with titanium paddles and shaped by hand, according to the firm’s website. The flavours on offer include seaweed, yuzu — a citrus fruit from Asia — Espelette pepper, Roscoff onion and lemon olive oil.
Butter from La Fromagée in Saint-Malo, BrittanyJARRY/TRIPELON/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Other sought-after butters include Échiré from western France; Dupont, which comes from the northeast of the country; and L&L Plaquette from Belgium.
Dining and Cooking