Did you know that the global demand for butter will increase to over 13 million metric tons by the year 2026?

While there is a huge demand for the consumption of butter around the world, few people outside of the dairy industry know how the butter making process works. Nut butters also have their own fascinating production processes. Few consumers understand these processes as well.

If you’ve ever wondered how the butters on your cupboard shelves or in your refrigerator are made, keep reading to find out how the best butters transform from raw ingredients into the products your know and love.

How Dairy Butter is Made

Traditionally, butter comes from cream separated from milk. Butter producers churn or mix this cream until it becomes partially solid.

As the cream churns, liquid buttermilk will come out of it. Farmers remove this liquid until no more comes out of the cream. They then shape and salt what’s left to make the butter.

In an industrial butter-making process, butter comes from whey, not whole milk. Whey is a byproduct of most cheese-making processes, and large farms use this instead of milk in butter-making to cut down on their waste.

How Nut Butter is Made

Another of the most popular types of butter is nut butter. These delicious butters need a more involved production process than dairy butter. This is especially true of peanut butter.

First, harvesters collect and clean the peanuts. If they’re not made into peanut butter right away, they’ll get stored inside their shells until the manufacturer is ready to use them.

When it’s time to make the peanut butter, the peanuts are taken out of storage, shelled, and sorted according to their size. They are then sorted again to make sure that any peanuts with defects or flaws get removed from the batch.

Once sorted, all the peanuts go through a dry roasting process. Whether this happens all at once or in batches, dry roasting is necessary to cook the peanuts and give them the appropriate flavor for peanut butter.

After roasting, manufacturers blanch the peanuts and remove their skins. Either heat or water blanching is the preferred method for this process. After blanching, the nuts are again sorted to remove any unusable peanuts.

Finally, the peanuts are ground and mixed with oil to make peanut butter.

While almond butter follows a slightly different production process, the cleaning, sorting, and roasting steps are largely the same. No matter what, the best almond butter will always know where their nuts come from to ensure that you receive the quality that you deserve in your products.

Learn More About the Butter Making Process

The information here is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to butter making processes. Research farmers and their production processes online to learn more about how they make and distribute different kinds of butter.

Want to know more about the production processes for other foods? Take a look at the other articles on our site!