Butter brands disappearing or shrinking in size

Some brands and sizes of butter that customers are used to are now starting to disappear from Slovak supermarket shelves, reported the SME daily on Tuesday. Instead of buying a 250-gram package, customers have to buy smaller sticks of butter, but for more money per gram of product. Moreover, Slovak butter is being squeezed out of the market by Polish and Czech brands. The paper reports that the significant lack of butter and its subsequent price growth is a Europe-wide problem and a consequence of several events that have taken place in Europe. Shortly after milk quotas were scrapped two years ago, the market was flooded with cheap milk from abroad and some producers had to reduce the number of dairy cows, as they failed to compete with the cheap milk. Ten percent of producers ceased to exist in Slovakia due to this. However, their cessation is now causing a lack of milk on the market, being reflected the most in butter.