From Viral Moment to Modern Dairy Platform: How All Things Dairy Is Rewriting a Commoditised Category
- PYD
- 22 hours ago
- 3 min read
Born from a viral lockdown video and scaled with CPG discipline, All Things Dairy demonstrates how social-first brand building, clean-label conviction, and protein-aligned innovation can unlock growth in one of food’s most commoditised categories. Its trajectory illustrates how cultural relevance, not just operational efficiency, is becoming a decisive competitive advantage in dairy.
Insights & Strategic Moves
A viral spark becomes a category strategy.
When British chef Thomas Straker posted a simple lockdown video blending wild garlic into butter, the outcome was not a campaign but a category reset. His “30 Butters in 30 Days” challenge took his TikTok following from 100,000 to one million in a single month, revealing latent consumer appetite for re-engaging with butter through creativity and education. The subsequent launch of All Things Butter in October 2023 captured this momentum at a moment when backlash against ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and renewed home cooking were reshaping attitudes to fats.
Social-first, shelf-second as a growth model.
Co-founder Toby Hopkinson, drawing on experience from other viral consumer brands, anchored the business in a content-first philosophy. The result is scale rarely seen in dairy: All Things Butter has accumulated 1 billion content views, making it the largest dairy brand on social media by following. Critically, this reach was treated as an entry point rather than an end state. Management recognised that packaging and buzz might deliver short-term trial, but repeat purchase would depend on tangible product superiority.
Product quality as the non-negotiable moat.
All Things Butter differentiated through process rather than provenance theatre. Its twice-churned method removes more moisture, delivering a creamier texture and stronger flavour without additives. The value proposition is explicit: visibly and sensorially superior butter at a price point well below premium French imports. While flavoured variants exist, sales are driven primarily by core salted and unsalted SKUs, reinforcing that innovation amplified, rather than replaced, everyday utility.
Navigating dairy volatility with CPG discipline.
The launch coincided with severe input inflation. Within six months, cream prices doubled, a critical shock when raw material accounts for roughly 50% of total cost. Rather than immediately passing through a 50% price increase to retailers, the company absorbed the margin impact to protect early distribution momentum. Since then, the business has adopted hedging, forward-buying, and even freezing butter to manage volatility driven by weather, energy costs, feed prices, geopolitics, and animal disease. In dairy, brand differentiation must be matched by sophisticated risk management.
Extending the platform: protein, gut health, clean label.
The evolution from butter to cottage cheese under the All Things Dairy umbrella reflects disciplined adjacency expansion. Cottage cheese was selected against three explicit macro trends: protein demand, gut health, and clean labels. The formulation choice — no potassium sorbate — limits shelf life to 30 days versus the typical 90, creating supply-chain complexity but reinforcing brand integrity. Initial launches include natural, mango, and mixed berry, with both sweet and savoury extensions planned.
The road ahead
All Things Dairy is building a repeatable playbook for legacy categories: use culture and content to re-enter relevance, then defend share through product superiority and disciplined operations. As the brand explores further adjacencies such as cream cheese and yoghurt, its success will hinge on maintaining clean-label credibility while scaling internationally in volatile commodity markets.
All Things Dairy shows that even in mature categories like butter, growth remains available to brands that combine cultural fluency, product-led differentiation, and CPG-grade execution — proving that commoditisation is not a ceiling, but a starting point.
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