Butter of the Month: Vital Farms Sea Salted Pasture-Raised Butter

Unboring Rating – 2 cows out of 4 cows

Humility and nobility aren’t qualities one typically ascribes to the same person, place, or thing.

The folks at Vital Farms are trying to challenge that conventional wisdom. After all, this farm comes with a CFO, CMO, VP of Talent & Culture, and a CEO with a prestigious McKinsey consulting pedigree. This might be the most ambitious farm in the country.

Things at Vital Farms weren’t always so ambitious.

Matt O’Hayer founded the company in 2007 with a simple mission: cultivate a better tasting egg through the humane treatment of hens. It turns out that hens have it pretty rough. Even ‘Cage-free hens’ live in severely claustrophobic conditions.  The ‘Cage-free’ claim simply means there are no cages; use of the claim to promote products requires zero minimum space requirements. Even ‘Free-Range hens’ can only roam up to 20 square feet per hen based on Certified Humane standards (a little more on that below). ‘Pasture-raised hens’, on the other hand, can roam up to 108 square feet per hen. Unlike the claim ‘Cage-free’, the claims ‘Free-range’ and ‘Pasture-raised’ are not regulated by the USDA. The non-profit organization Humane Farm Animal Care (HFAC) took the lead and created what is now industry-accepted standards for use of ‘Pasture-raised’ claims via the ‘Certified Humane Raised and Handled® label. When a claim is unregulated by the USDA (or any other governing body or authority) it means that use of that term is subject to interpretation because there are no specified guidelines and no authority to enforce compliance. The result is companies marketing products in a manner that is misleading. On that note, ‘Pasture-raised’ does not mean ‘Organic’.

Before Vital Farms, pasture-raised eggs represented 0.1% of the domestic egg market. By 2018, this market had grown to 2.7% of all egg sales with Vital Farms commanding a staggering 73% market share. Vital Farms now generates $100 million in sales.

In many ways, Matt O’Hayer is a true embodiment of the American Dream. He grew up in Rhode Island. Early on, he decided he was going to pave his own way (he decided to pursue entrepreneurship instead of a college degree). He started his first business (an egg business) just before he turned 13 years of age. He experienced the emotional ups and downs that most entrepreneurs face as a rite of passage. Mr. O’Hayer had successfully parlayed his initial start-up in the 1980s into a travel company with $50 million in sales by 1998. Three years later, the tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks forced O’Hayer to foreclose that same promising travel company. He spent the next five years living on a catamaran before moving to Austin, Texas in 2007. Mr. O’Hayer is friends with Whole Foods founder John Mackey. Through that relationship, Mr. O’Hayer gained visibility to consumer demand for more humanely-raised food products.  He went back to his family roots and decided to purchase twenty Rhode Island Red Hens and a 27-acre plot of land in Austin. He started selling pasture-raised eggs to local restaurants and farmer’s markets. In the beginning, customers were unwilling to spend the premium on a pasture-raised egg. Mr. O’Hayer had to throw out any unsold eggs. He stayed the course, however, and refused to lower his price believing there was potential. He got his break when Whole Foods agreed to sell his eggs in store. The rest is history. It’s an awesome testament to Mr. O’Hayer’s grit and to the American Dream.

As Vital Farms has grown, Mr. O’Hayer has shifted his focus from farming and sales to marketing and expansion.  As part of this expansion, Vital Farms has diversified its product offerings to include pasture-raised butter. We enthusiastically purchased their Sea salted Pasture-raised Butter to test.

On paper, there’s a lot to like. The packaging has a trendy chalkboard-style look and feel reminiscent of the same chalkboards one might find at a farmer’s market. The font style is handwritten and evokes that same “underdog brand” vibe one gets shopping at Trader Joe’s (which is also known for their unique handwritten signage). The butter comes packaged in a sticks format with a brown butcher paper-esque wrapper. The Vital Farms branding is very well-executed. Overall, the brand successfully conveys “locally and responsibly-farmed” products.

The butter has an 85% butterfat content which is 3% higher than the USDA’s minimum butterfat content requirement for butter’s standard of identity. The USDA standard of identity defines what a food must be comprised of in order to be marketed and promoted as that food. For example, standard of identity is at the very root of the animal-based meat versus plant-based meat (i.e. Beyond Meat, etc) regulatory battle. In short, more is better when it comes to butterfat!

Needless to say we couldn’t wait to taste Vital Farm’s pasture-raised butter. Surprisingly, we were somewhat underwhelmed. Both the taste and appearance fell short of expectations. Much of the shortcoming simply has to do with what Pasture-raised means in the context of butter. Pasture-raised means that a cow’s diet may consist of some grains while Grass-fed means the cow’s diet consists entirely of mother’s milk and grass. The result is a middling quality butter. The butter flavor doesn’t get the rich buttery notes from a grain-fed cow’s milk and it doesn’t get the complex herbaceous notes from a grass-fed cow’s milk. This same narrative plays out in the color and appearance. The color lacks that alluring “omega-rich gold” color of a grass-fed butter and lacks the dense opacity of a traditional grain-fed butter despite possessing 85% butterfat. Ultimately, Vital Farm’s Sea salted Pasture-raised Butter looked and tasted marginally better than a typical albeit respectable butter which is why we awarded it a two cow rating.

The Vital Farm’s mission and the Matt O’Hayer story definitely meets the Unboring criteria for a four cow rating. Both are inspiring.

Mr. O’Hayer is an indisputable entrepreneurial talent and success story. His company supports American farmers. His eggs and butter are farmed humanely. He (with the help of Whole Foods) single-handedly drove a new category for eggs. We can only dream of achieving the same success with our Unboring Granola!

Key Takeaway

Farm work is about as humbling an occupation as they come. By definition, farm work requires one literally stay grounded. It’s hard to keep one’s feet on the ground when the mission is as lofty as Vital Farms’. In our humble opinion, Vital Farms Sea salted Pasture-raised Butter reflects a company that is prioritizing growth and its mission to provide every American consumer with humanely-raised eggs and butter over the craft of making an exceptional butter. That is to say that exceptional farming (like exceptional cooking) is the product of great care and humility—the kind of care and humility that is hard to scale up when you are a $100 million company. That being said, we wouldn’t underestimate Mr. O’Hayer.

We do not receive any form of compensation for our reviews by any of the butter brands we feature. The views expressed in our blog are solely based on our own opinions.