Fair trade organic butter brand is now top seller in France
'C'est qui le Patron?!' brand bases its success on getting consumers involved in the development of products, including setting the price and paying producers a fair wage
The brand ‘C’est qui le Patron?!’ takes the lead even though its products are far from being in all the shops (in only 54% of the shops for unsalted butter and 32% for slightly salted butter)
C'est qui le Patron?!
Just one month after its milk became France’s top-selling brand, a fair trade group is enjoying similar success with two of its organic butter products (an unsalted and a slightly salted butter).
The C’est qui le Patron?! brand launched in 2016 with the aim of paying farmers a fair price for milk, making it a few centimes costlier than many other milks.
Read more:Fair Trade brand becomes France’s top-selling milk
Its butter comes at a recommended price of €2.94, while supermarket own-brand butters normally cost between €1.60 and €1.80, and other brands may go up to €2.50. However, it may not be the most expensive butter on the supermarket shelves.
This price enables C’est qui le Patron?! to pay producers €466 for every 1,000l produced, and its Bio butter range has also allowed for €3.2million to be distributed to farmers who are moving towards organic practices.
The brand is run by a co-operative, including shoppers who pay a symbolic €1 to become members and play a part in production strategy.
One of its key aims is to attract consumers with a model that challenges the concept of ‘lowest price is what shoppers want’, often found in mass retail.
The brand now offers 32 products, including wine, potatoes, yoghurts and chickens, which are sold in 7,265 outlets.
Its milk is sold at a recommended price of €0.99 per litre, a few centimes more than the average.
The group recently announced in January that two of its bio butters are also now number one in their categories, excluding promotions, despite not yet being stocked in all stores.
“Now in France, three fair trade products that support producers are topping sales. You cannot imagine how much awareness this creates and how helpful it will be in moving things forward,” a spokesperson for the brand said.
The butters launched in 2017 and 22.8 million packs have since been sold. A percentage of all sales is set aside to help producers in the process of converting to organic methods.
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