COMPARATIVE TEST

Table Butter

All good, more or less

Are you a butter person? Indeed you are, if you like your toast and pastry with butter, paratha with butter, dal with butter, and so on. Well, while so much butter is not good for your health, what with the saturated fats in it, using moderate amounts of it as a spread, an ingredient, or flavour enhancer can be part of healthy food choices. In any case, butter is a part of our diets. Mostly, we stick to the brand that we are used to consuming. Once in a while comes along a brand that claims to be ‘unsalted’ and that may shake us out of our stupor, leaving us wondering what that means. So, are they all as good as one another and do they meet the basic quality requirements for fat, solids not fat, moisture, and salt? Do we know how much moisture is acceptable? Do all the brands in the market fulfil the minimum requirements and are they all safe for consumption? Are there brands that taste better? This report is a firsthand study of some popular brands of butter available in India.

A Consumer Voice Report

For our tests, we purchased seven popular brands of table butter as well as one brand of white butter. These were subjected to comparative testing at an NABLaccredited laboratory. The study was confined to key quality parameters specified by Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) as well as methods of testing specified in Indian Standard (IS: 13690: 1992) and related standards (IS: 3507-1966).