Squeeze butter12/23/2023 The Jif Squeeze Creamy Peanut Butter will be available beginning in July 2020, a PR rep confirmed to Best Products. The 13-ounce pouch is filled with creamy peanut butter, which makes sense, since those peanut chunks wouldn’t be as easy to squeeze out, but you never know if that will be next up on the variety list. But dramatic change in local retail is as likely as getting a French baker to make croissants with margarine-it’s not going to happen.As the name suggests, the new packaging is squeezable, so you can easily squirt it on your sandwich, in a smoothie, on top of ice cream, or anywhere you need a little protein-filled goodness. Adjustment might yet come, say if online retail were to grow quickly, or if technology let suppliers sell more directly to consumers. That lets established shops keep on with old ways, such as fixing prices with suppliers only in February. France is less exposed to intrusive discount supermarkets than most countries in Europe. Too many peculiar rules keep away outsiders who could shake things up, for example when local committees of officials and traders that control land use reject foreign supermarkets that bid to build new stores. But one way of getting that would be if France were to engender more competition between supermarkets. In October Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, called for a better system of negotiations between suppliers of fresh goods and buyers, saying producers need to get more clout. No surprise, therefore, that French farmers prefer to export butter rather than meet local demand. In contrast supermarkets in France only put up their prices by 6% in the same period. In Germany retail butter prices rose by 72% in the year to August (and producers received higher payments too), says a person who works in the dairy industry. Because just a few big supermarkets dominate, enjoying monopsonistic power, they fix prices for suppliers of many fresh goods just once a year, says Ms Auriole. Blame that on a local retail market that is less competitive than most. Yet French consumers alone confront empty shelves. Bloomberg said the wholesale butter price in Europe that month, €6,500 ($7,750) a tonne, was a record since figures were first collected 17 years ago. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations reported a 27% increase in its dairy-price index in September. The result has been higher global prices of late. In the West, too, dietary habits are adjusting: sugar is increasingly shunned as unhealthy, but hunger for full-cream milk, butter and cheese appears to be returning. “China has discovered croissants,” notes Emmanuelle Auriole of the Toulouse School of Economics. At the same time, global demand for butter has also been changing. Suppliers were hit by a period of low prices: impoverished small producers of milk in France reported monthly take-home income as low as a few hundred euros. In 2015 the European Union ended a quota system for milk-producers, part of an effort to reduce subsidies and let a freer market function (draining a notorious “milk lake” and melting a “butter mountain”). Supply of dairy products has been in flux for a while. Two big international changes explain the squeeze. Is there really a shortage and, if so, why does France have bare shelves when other countries do not? The French remain both the heaviest consumers of butter and big producers of it. The ingredient is vital for much French cuisine: a quarter of the weight of a decent croissant, for example, comes from butter. Beyond supermarkets, chefs and others lament soaring costs. Social-media users, under the tag #beurregate, joke about selling small packets of the stuff-even an individual slice of buttered toast-at fattened prices. The press talks of the worst butter shortage since the second world war and mentions cases of butter-hoarding. BARE shelves in food shops have been a sadly common sight in Zimbabwe or Venezuela, but are surely unimaginable in wealthy, well-run France? Yet in the past few weeks, those seeking butter in the country’s supermarkets have been met by empty fridges and apologetic notes from managers.
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