🔒Lobster-flavored butter? Maine butter company gets creative as it expands

From its humble beginnings in the kitchen of the Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church in Portland to its current 2,200-square-foot factory in Scarborough, Casco Bay Butter is expanding regionally and into new markets, including potentially lobster-flavored butter.

The idea for the homemade butter company started in 2012, when two of Casco Bay's co-owners, Jennell Carter and Alicia Menard, were visiting friend Sue Konkel, who gave them some bacon and blue cheese butter she had made with store-bought butter. They loved it on turkey burgers, and started to look at what else to put it on. Then they decided to create their own business.

But first, they had to learn how to make butter, a laborious, trial-and-error process. They initially used KitchenAid mixers at the church. That led to buying their first 15-gallon butter churn, called “Jerri,” that allowed them to not have to hand-squeeze the butter. They later bought floor mixers and a larger 65-gallon churn called “Ben” and in August 2014 moved to their current location in Scarborough, where they make up to 3,000 pounds of flavored butter a month, mostly in 5.5-ounce containers, but some in one-pound logs for local restaurants. The company is self-funded.

In an early foray into sales, they sold 54 packages of butter at the Kennebunk Farmers' Market, and knew they had a hit on their hands. They brought on Andrew Menard, who still divides his time between Casco Bay and a wine distributor. Of the four owner-operators, both Menards and Carter work full time (though they also have other full-time jobs). They hope 2016 will be the year when they scale up enough to leave their other jobs and focus on the butter business.

The Menards and Carter recently shared their cilantro lime, cinnamon sugar, cultured sea salt and other butters with Mainebiz at their factory, just days after returning from taste-tests at Fairway Market locations in New York City. They also sell to 26 Hannaford and 22 Whole Foods stores, the latter of which they hope to expand to 38 in January. An edited transcript follows.

Mainebiz: What distinguishes your butter?

Jennell Carter: We try to keep our dairy sources as local as possible. We are organically certified [in our factory]. But since Moo Milk went out of business there is no processor for organic dairy in Maine. We're working with farmers and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association to try to rectify the situation in Maine so small businesses can have organic cream.

The company idea started when Sue flavored store-bought butter with bacon and blue cheese. Alicia and I wanted to have some sort of food business, because it's a passion of ours. I read an article out of Wisconsin that predicted butter would follow suit with cheese, which is that 10 to 15 years ago you probably had one or two varieties of cheese in your refrigerator and now you have several. They thought butter would be the same way, with multiple flavors.

MB: How are you organically certified?

Alicia Menard: We follow certain processes and are certified by MOFGA. It's everything from the cleaning products we use to pest control and how we handle products and where we store the products.

MB: Your butter is high priced. What is the competition?

Andrew Menard: We don't really compete with Kate's Homemade Butter because they're national. Then there is Kerrygold Irish butter, but we are better than them and we consider ourselves an artisanal product. We are a super-premium product, priced at $6.50 to $7.50 for 5.5 ounces. But we use real Italian truffles in our butter, for example.

MB: You expect to become full-time in 2016 and expand. How so?

Jennell Carter: We just started talking with the lobster industry to co-brand butter with lobster and sea salt. And we see growth in areas outside grocery stores.

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