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Sacré beurre: fears over croissant price hike as France faces butter shortage Sacré beurre: fears over croissant price hike as France faces butter shortage
(about 13 hours later)
Bakers in France have warned that a vertiginous rise in the price of butter was slashing their profit margins and threatening an entire industry. It is one of France’s most fabled delicacies, a flaky, crescent-shaped and feather-light indulgence first imported – legend has it – from Vienna, and as pleasurable in the mouth as it is ruinous for the waistline.
The price of butter, which makes up a quarter of the ingredients of many French pastries, rocketed 92% in the year to May, according to Fabien Castanier, the general secretary of the federation of French biscuit and cakemakers. But the croissant, along with its equally appetising relative the pain au chocolat and other iconic French pastries such as the brioche, is at risk from an unprecedented shortage of its principle ingredient: butter.
The rise was putting “unsustainable economic pressure” on the industry, he said. “Last April, we were paying €2,500 a tonne,” said Matthieu Labbé of the baking industry body FEB. “Now it’s €5,300. At best, consumers are going to have to pay more. At worst, we may no longer be able to get butter.”
“Based on the current price, the extra charge annually is around €68m for makers of biscuits and cakes,” he said. A nationwide pastry penury is possible, said Fabien Castanier of the federation of French biscuit and cake-makers. “The industry is under unsustainable pressure,” he said. “And it’s going to get worse. There’s a real risk of butter running out.”
“Unfortunately the situation is going to get worse in the next few weeks with a strong risk of butter running out.” Although shrouded in layers of legend, historians agree the croissant was inspired by the Austrian kipfel or Hörnchen, a crescent-shaped cake supposedly created to celebrate the vital role of Vienna’s bakers in defeating the 1683 siege of the city by the Ottomans.
Matthieu Labbe, a bakers’ industry spokesman, said: “There is a real threat of butter shortages by the end of the year which could lead to panic on markets.” Up early to start baking their bread, the bakers are said to have heard the Turkish soldiers tunnelling under the city and alerted the authorities. Inconveniently for this story, however, crescent-shaped breads and cakes existed in Austria and elsewhere centuries earlier.
The industry bodies are calling on responsible behaviour from supermarkets and cafes and restaurants to pass on the rise in the price of butter in the prices they charge shoppers, to avoid additional suffering for producers. Another much-repeated story recounts that Marie-Antoinette, nostalgic for the flavours of her native Vienna, was responsible for introducing the croissant to France in the 1770s – but that, too, is belied by the fact that the first French reference to the iconic pastry does not appear until the 1840s.
The consequence would be that “the price the consumer pays for croissants, tarts and brioches is going to rise significantly very quickly”. What is certain is that the innovation that ensured the croissant’s success – possibly pioneered by an Austrian-born baker called August Zang at his patisserie in the rue Richelieu in central Paris at about that time – was to use puff pastry. From then on, the delicacy took off, rapidly becoming a breakfast staple.
The rise in the price of butter is blamed on falling milk yields in Europe, and especially in France, coupled with rising demand both domestically and internationally. By 1872, Charles Dickens, on a visit to the French capital, was singing the praises of “the dainty croissant on the boudoir table” and contrasting it unfavourably with the “dismal monotony” of British bread.
But butter represents around 25% of a croissant’s ingredients, Labbé told Le Figaro newspaper, and both France’s baked goods industry and the country’s 30,000-odd boulangeries-patisseries will not be able to absorb shrinking profit margins for much longer.
Bakers are also appealing to supermarkets to charge consumers more and pass some of the increase on to suppliers. “Prices won’t double,” Labbé said. “But there will have to be significant increases or some bakers could really be in difficulty.”
The rise in wholesale butter prices is mainly blamed on falling milk yields across Europe but especially in France, together with rising demand both domestically and internationally and the fact that most milk is used to make cheese or cream, not butter.
At the same time, French farmers complain that they are receiving less for their milk than it costs to produce because Europe has a glut of 350,000 tonnes of powdered milk, which is depressing prices.At the same time, French farmers complain that they are receiving less for their milk than it costs to produce because Europe has a glut of 350,000 tonnes of powdered milk, which is depressing prices.