12 Popular Grocery Store Butter Brands, Ranked

Can you imagine a flaky croissant without the rich taste of butter? Mashed potatoes would be pretty sad and bland without a heaping helping of everyone's favorite dairy-based fat. That's not to mention the utility it has beyond just its flavor. Finishing sauces with butter helps to give them a velvety texture due to butter's emulsifying properties — the water in butter turning into steam is what gives puff pastry its lift.

It's safe to say that (almost) everything is better with butter, but that doesn't mean every brand of butter is equally great. Any grocery store will stock a variety of sticks, blocks, and tubs at prices that range from affordable to luxurious, and it can be hard to tell which ones are the best to buy. That's where Tasting Table comes in. We picked up a wide selection of butter brands from our local supermarkets and taste-tested them all so we could present our findings to you, ranked from worst to best. For this test, we bought exclusively salted butter and let each option come to room temperature to make a fair comparison between brands. We spread them so thickly on pieces of bread that all we could taste was butter. A couple were disappointing, most were pretty good, and a few were life-changing.

Different brands of butter seem to soften at different rates. After two hours on the counter, some brands almost melted, but Organic Valley remained firm yet perfectly spreadable. Its texture was its greatest asset — creamy and smooth. Other than that, it was fairly unremarkable and didn't have a lot of flavor. It reminded us most of Land O' Lakes, except that it had fewer of the milky, sugary notes that made that brand of butter distinctive. Instead, Organic Valley tasted mostly of neutral fat. There was a teeny bit of umami flavor in the aftertaste, and the butter was seasoned with plenty of salt, but this wasn't enough to overcome the overall weakness of its flavor.

Organic Valley butter didn't have any off-notes, which gave it a fairly significant edge over Lucerne. However, at nearly $7.00 a pound from Sprouts, it cost significantly more than standard grocery store butter. Of course, if you are passionate about animal welfare, you may find the fact that this butter is made using milk from pasture-raised cows to be worth paying extra for. Even if that's true, though, other pasture-raised butters on this list brought a lot more in the taste department.

This butter fills an interesting niche in the market. It's a premium butter, but it's not organic — just non-GMO certified (the cows are fed on crops that aren't genetically modified). It also has a Validus animal welfare certification. We paid $7 for it at our local Sprouts, which was comparable to some of the organic butters. If you're not into GMOs, there's a good chance you prefer to buy organic anyway.

In any case, this was another premium butter that didn't have as much flavor as we would have liked. We will give it points for its sweet cream taste — we could detect some of the milky notes we look for in high-quality butter. However, it also had some of the bland fattiness we encountered with Clover and Organic Valley. A truly great butter needs to have hints of fresh cream balanced with umami and tang, and this product only had one side of the equation. Also, according to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, there's no real scientific evidence that genetically-modified foods are bad for you, so we don't see any compelling reason to spend extra on this butter brand.

Danish Creamery brands its flagship product as premium butter, but there didn't seem to be anything exceptional about it besides the name. It's also not Danish — although the company was founded by Danish immigrants in the 1800s, it's actually located in California. To us, it looked and tasted like average grocery store butter. Nothing about it was bad, but after we ate it, we struggled to remember what Danish Creamery butter tasted like.

This was one of the saltiest-tasting butters on this list, which was our favorite thing about it. It had very little sweet dairy flavor, but the saltiness was perfect for spreading on toast. However, the salt couldn't mask the fact that the underlying product was pretty bland. We don't think we would enjoy an unsalted version of Danish Creamery butter — other than the salt providing savoriness, there just wasn't much going on taste-wise. It was like a more well-seasoned version of Organic Valley. Nevertheless, we like salt and we appreciate that this butter is on the affordable side, so it lands near the middle of the pack.

When we bought Tillamook butter, we scoffed at its "extra creamy" branding. All butter is creamy, so how could Tillamook go the extra mile, especially since this butter only contains a modest 81% butterfat? We're not sure what kind of magic they're playing with up in Oregon, but this really was the creamiest-tasting butter we tried. It rivaled Land O' Lakes for sweetness while also delivering a rich, fatty mouthfeel. This butter also remained firm and emulsified at room temperature, which we appreciated.

Tillamook was one of the most complex butters we tried flavor-wise, for good and ill. On the plus side, in addition to a ton of sweet cream, this product also delivered some mouth-watering umami in its aftertaste. We appreciated the savory flavor, especially since Tillamook didn't taste quite as salty as we would have liked; the savoriness of the butter helped make up for the relative lack of salt. As for the negative, we detected a faint hint of the bizarre SweeTARTS flavor that bothered us in the Lucerne. It wasn't enough to ruin Tillamook for us, but the sour candy tang did knock this butter down a few spots on our list.

Horizon's butter golden-hued sticks are made with pasture-raised milk, and whatever those cows are eating in the fields seems to have made a notable impact on the taste of the butter. This is the butter to buy if you want no sugary notes at all — it was completely devoid of sweetness. Like Clover, it kind of tasted more like oil than butter, but instead of canola, Horizon reminded us of yummy extra-virgin olive oil (the flavor resemblance was uncanny). This butter had a mild bitterness, some soapy (in a good way) notes, and all the bright pepperiness you associate with high-quality olive oil.

Though enjoyable, that flavor would limit the applications you'd want to use Horizon Organic butter. It wouldn't be our first choice for most desserts — we'd reach for a sweeter, more neutral-tasting butter like Land O' Lakes in that context. But for savory food, particularly anything with a Mediterranean influence, this would be our go-to.

Kerrygold may be a little more expensive than some of the other butter brands at the grocery store, but it's worth every penny. It earns its name with its deep, rich, gold color — it almost looked dyed. This was the only butter we could smell the second we opened the wrapper. An intoxicating odor of fat, salt, cream, and grass wafted toward our nostrils. 

The butter is churned from milk produced by Irish grass-fed cattle, and we noticed a noticeable flavor difference between it and American butter, even the stuff from pasture-raised cows. Its flavor wasn't as eccentric as that of Nellie's or Horizon. Instead, it gave us all the standard butter notes — creamy dairy, sweetness, salt, and sharp savoriness — but just with the volume turned up. Thankfully, it had none of the bland fattiness of lesser butter brands.

Kerrygold's rich flavor and soft, unctuous texture were doubly surprising to us considering the fact that the U.S. version of this product is made following domestic butter standards. American Kerrygold salted butter is only 80% butterfat, but you wouldn't know that from tasting it. It was much more flavorful (and even seemed fattier) than Vital Farms butter, even though the latter contains 5% more fat. No matter whether you're looking to use butter in cooking, baking, or as a bread topping, we think you'll find that Kerrygold is a flavor upgrade over your usual brand.