A conversation from Be Better My Friend.
You likely did not get into baking to manage commodity markets.
You got in to make great product and build a business that lasts. Which means the ingredient decisions you make today are not just about next month’s invoice. They are about where your kitchen is in three years. What your menu can do. Who can eat it. How your brand is talked about.
Butter is a brilliant ingredient. It also comes with a job description most bakers never signed up for.
Butter does not hold still
Over the last five years, butter spot has moved from €4.10 to €8.50 and back to €4.10 again. In that same period it has climbed by more than 70% and crashed by more than 40%. More than once.
Right now it is at a five-year low. That is genuinely good for anyone buying it today.
But the structural forces that drive it upward like shrinking European dairy herds, tighter environmental regulation and energy exposure for dairy farmer, have not changed. Every previous floor in the last decade was followed by a recovery. The only question is timing.
On 10 tonnes per year, the swing between a cheap year and an expensive one is worth €20,000 or more on your ingredient line alone. That uncertainty has a cost even when this month’s invoice looks fine.
Be Better carries a stable annual price. That is not a small thing when you are trying to plan a business.
Ingredient cost is only part of the conversation
Here is what we find when we sit down with bakers and look at the full picture.
Allergen complexity. Dairy is one of the fourteen major allergens under EU food law. That means label reviews every time a recipe changes. HACCP documentation on every dairy-containing SKU. Dedicated line cleaning when allergen-free and standard production share the same space. Staff time. Customer questions. None of this appears as a line item. All of it is real and across a kitchen running 15 to 25 dairy SKUs, it is worth roughly €16,000 a year in absorbed operational cost.
Carbon exposure. Dairy butter produces roughly five times the CO2 of Be Better per 100 grams (independently validated by lifecycle assessment). With CSRD reporting expanding and shadow carbon pricing moving upward, this is becoming a business number, not just a sustainability one. On 10 tonnes, the quantifiable annual value of that carbon saving sits at approximately €5,800 at current EU ETS pricing.
What the numbers add up to. Looking at three years, for a 10-tonne operation, the combined saving on ingredient cost and indirect costs runs from around €100,000 in a scenario where butter stays historically cheap, to over €160,000 if dairy follows the cycle it has followed twice in the last four years. Those are not marketing numbers. They come from a model with visible assumptions that we will walk you through line by line.
Now for the conversation we need to have
The costs that one in five European consumers is actively avoiding or reducing dairy. In the 18–34 age group that number climbs to one in four.
Think about what that means for a pastry counter or a catering menu that is 100% dairy-based. That is not a niche. That is a structural shift in who walks through your door and what they can order when they get there.
Every table that leaves without buying because there was nothing they could eat is an opportunity cost that never shows up on a report. Every wholesale client that asks for a dairy-free option you cannot supply is a conversation that ends early. Every corporate catering brief that specifies inclusive menus, and increasingly they do, is a brief you either win or you do not.
Be Better is not a dietary workaround bolted onto a standard range. It performs like butter. It is designed to sit at the centre of a modern menu so that your best pastry is also the pastry everyone can eat.
That is not just a commercial opportunity. It is a story your brand gets to tell. Clean label. Inclusive by design. Lower carbon. No allergen burden. These things are increasingly how forward-thinking bakeries are being chosen by wholesale buyers, by conscious consumers, by the generation that is about to become your core customer.
What we are actually offering
Be Better My Friend exists to modernise pastry by reducing risk and complexity. That is our mission and not just a selling an ingredient.
A fixed price in a volatile market is a reduction in risk. A simpler allergen position is a reduction in complexity. An inclusive menu is a reduction in the risk of being irrelevant to a growing part of your market. These things compound. And they compound quietly until suddenly a competitor has a cleaner label, a broader menu or a shorter ingredient list than you do.
We are not saying butter is wrong. We are saying that doing this deliberately with eyes open, numbers visible, strategy clear, is better than doing it by default.
Here is the invitation
Bring your actual numbers. Your volume, your purchase price, your allergen SKU count.
We will show you every assumption. You can challenge every one of them. If the picture makes sense for your business, you will know exactly why. If it does not, you will leave with a sharper view of your butter position than you had before.
That conversation is worth having either way.
Be Better My Friend. We modernise pastry by reducing risk and complexity.
