Headline - Butter Churns
Butter Churn Industry Beginning to Worry in This Era of Store-Bought Spreads
Forth Worth, TX - Berome Tyler sells infants. But these aren’t the kind of be-diapered babies you usually think of when you hear the word “infants”; these are butter churns. But Tyler is worried. Very worried. “Sometimes progress hurts,” he laments during his traditional morning stroll through the factory floor of this, one of now only four manufacturing plants left in what was once the Sunshine Churn butter churn empire. “We used to have seven plants cranking out hundreds of churns a day. Now, we’re only down to four plants, and if things don’t pick up, we could be closing another one within five years.”
The pain Sunshine Churns Inc. feels is shared by the only ten other butter churn manufacturers that still exist in this country, who together now are only able to keep 89 factories afloat. It’s becoming more and more apparent that the era of store bought butter, margarine, and other spreads is not just an era. It’s more than an era. “Since the 1860s, when factory-made butter started showing up in stores, people have been buying fewer and fewer churns. Sales are down at least 78% since then. And I don’t see them coming back up anytime soon,” said Tyler.
Not that they haven’t tried. Sunshine Churns released its Internet-enabled iCream 14R in 2006 with great fanfare. But consumer response was lackluster at best. Another once-was powerhouse in the churn industry, Kenney Brothers, is even this month making a push to appeal to the tech-saavy consumer with its time machine/butter churn two-in-one device. But, again, today’s America is just not taking the bait.
Although some marketing experts think that the name of the product, Living Tadpoles Found in Your Stool ii, has a lot to do with the more-than-disappointing sales, Kenney Brothers CEO Brushter Kenney knows that the true culprit is simply that today’s butter eater is more and more on-the-go and doesn’t want to take the time to make their bread spreads. “I wish I could just go back in time and experience those salad days when everyone carried around their butter churns like people do with cell phones now,” sighed Kenney.
