Butter is Back! From MAHA Moms to Japanese Pancakes

Plus: Can Whole Foods sell Coca-Cola and still keep its soul?

Nov 16, 2025

Here is what’s in today’s edition (and the last edition, in case you missed it):

Whole Foods Tightrope: Can the organic leader sell us Coke?

The Return of Butter: Is butter the most under-reported trend of 2026?

The Intensity Economy: Are we in a sensation bubble?

Ideas from the Future: Hypothetical concepts for tomorrow based on today’s insights

Signals from the Shelf: Early signs of potential changes

Gut Reaction: My hot takes on new offerings

Tidbits: The latest in food industry news, from the profound to the funny

Can Whole Foods Sell Coca-Cola Without Losing Its Soul?

Whole Foods/Amazon dropped a big announcement last week that got very little coverage.

The company is piloting a Whole Foods concept store that houses a 10,000-square-foot micro-fulfillment center full of 12,000 SKUs of conventional groceries and household essentials (e.g., Kraft Mac & Cheese, Pringles, Cheez-Its, Coca-Cola, etc.). Normally, Whole Foods would never let these products touch their shelves, but now customers can order these items via QR code while shopping in-store, or add them to delivery orders. Amazon calls it a “store within a store.”

What I call it: psychological quarantine.

Amazon Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

Amazon knows most of their Whole Foods shoppers aren’t pure. They’re buying the conventional products (Amazon has the receipts!). They just aren’t buying them at Whole Foods.

That’s a real problem for Amazon. These shoppers are performing their aspirational identity at Whole Foods, then sneaking off to Walmart or Instacarting their mundane stuff. However, every trip elsewhere for Coke and Hostess snack cakes is lost revenue that Amazon desperately wants to recover.

The answer? Give shoppers their organic gluten-free cake and let them eat their Twinkies too, just never in the same visible transaction.

The Tension: Purity Requires Exclusion

This is where Amazon faces the real challenge. You can’t just stick Charmin on the shelf next to the $9 recycled bamboo toilet paper without destroying the entire value proposition.

Whole Foods isn’t a supermarket that happens to sell organic food. Curation is its identity! Their promise is: you can shop on autopilot here because we’ve already filtered out the ‘garbage.’ The benefit to the Whole Food core shopper isn’t just the product selection, it’s the mental relief of not having to constantly question the wellness value of everything you pick up.

Put conventional products on the shelf and you break that contract. You force the cognitive load back onto customers. You turn Whole Foods into Walmart with better lighting and a 40% markup.

So, that leads us to Amazon’s current gamble: What if purity doesn’t require physical separation? What if a digital wall is enough?

Platform Segregation Logic Meets Physical Retail

The micro-fulfillment center isn’t about logistics efficiency. Amazon operates 800+ distribution centers, they don’t need another one. This is about keeping conventional products physically out of sight while making them psychologically accessible.

It’s the same strategy Amazon uses everywhere else. Online, you can buy artisanal olive oil and motor oil in the same cart because the interface doesn’t judge. The platform accommodates everything but the curation layer makes you feel like you’re only seeing what matters to you.

Now they’re testing whether that works in physical space. The Cheez-Its exist, but they live in a robot-operated back-room customers never see. You can add it to your cart via app, but you’ll never have the moment of emotional reckoning where your basket contains both bio-dynamic arugula and Miller Lite Beer Can-flavored Pringles.

The bet: affluent consumers will accept this cognitive dissonance if they don’t have to witness it.

What This Means for Brands

1. Your brand positioning now has to survive two contexts at once
You’re no longer just competing on the Whole Foods shelf, you’re competing against the invisible “shadow shelf” that lives behind the QR codes. If you’re a premium or natural brand, you now sit next to Lay’s potato chips in the shopper’s transaction, even if you don’t sit next to them on the aisle.
If your brand relies heavily on “I don’t belong with the processed stuff,” that moat just shrank.

2. Premium brands are going to lose some of their captive advantage
Whole Foods used to force trade-up because cheaper conventional equivalents didn’t exist in the building. If this concept becomes reality, those equivalents are one scan away. Any premium brand with weak differentiation could feel the true price elasticity of its shopper.
If your premium SKU is basically just a nicer label and a brand story, you’re exposed.

3. Emerging brands lose a piece of their insulation
Whole Foods historically acted as a curated safe zone where smaller brands weren’t in immediate comparison with the $2.99 megabrands.
Now? You may still be on the curated shelf, but your competition is sitting backstage waiting to be summoned. The comparison gap narrows. Expect margin pressure. (i.e., will WF use this as a bludgeon to bring brands margins down ?)

5. Brand storytelling becomes more important, not less
If a retailer gives shoppers one frictionless screen to choose between your $7 granola and the $4 national brand, your differentiation has to hold at the identity level.
If you can’t articulate why you belong on the curated side of the wall, consumers won’t bother protecting you.

The Retailer Impact

This is still just a concept, but it’s a canary in the coal mine for the future direction of grocery retail.

I’ve talked about this before. Every major retailer wants their stores to be a closed ecosystem, a walled garden where the customer never has to leave to finish filling their basket. Micro-fulfillment, hybrid carts, back-room inventory that never touches a shelf, digital add-ons layered over physical browsing, these aren’t experiments anymore, they’re the future competitive set.

The goal is simple: stop consumers from shopping around. Capture the whole trip, not just the category.

When the shelf becomes finite but the retailer’s ecosystem becomes infinite, consumers don’t just compare products, they start recombining them. New category adjacencies emerge. New trade-offs appear. Products that were never in the same mental frame suddenly coexist in a single transaction.

The real shift isn’t that Whole Foods might sell Coke, shocking as that might be, it’s that every retailer is moving toward a world where the shelf you see and the digital shelf you can access are combined, and brands will have to compete in both realities at once.

Innovation That Actually Works

Most teams have no shortage of data. What they lack is a way to turn it into a profitable, future-ready portfolio. Too often, innovation ends up trapped in templates, recycled playbooks, and launches that feel safe but stall out.

Malachite is different. We don’t push frameworks for the sake of process. We build strategies rooted in real consumer needs, sharpen portfolios, and design innovations that stick. All done in facilitated concert with your team. It’s innovation built for profitable outcomes, not theater.

Learn more about Malachite

Products: Golden Hooves Regenerative Butter; Raw Farm Raw Grass-Grazed Cultured Butter; Dominique Ansel’s Hokkaido milk soft serve dipped in French butter; Jack’s Dining Room Japanese Pancakes at Butter Restaurant; Miss Jones Cookie Dough Made with Real Butter; Butter Me Up Popcorn; Tillamook Butternaise; Level Up Keto Butter Creamer; Sur la Table x 4^th & Heart Ghee cooking classes

Is Butter the Most Under-Reported Trend of 2026?

“I’m a butter mom”

The first time I heard someone say those words was about six months ago. I was in kitchen, talking to a woman about health and nutrition routines, when she said it casually, like it needed no explanation. Since then, I’ve heard it again and again as the term spreads through social feeds.

There’s no official definition, but it’s usually explained by first talking about its opposite: “almond mom.” The almond mom counts grams of everything, is obsessed with weight, and treats food like a math equation. In contrast, the butter mom embraces intuition, cooks with real ingredients, and isn’t interested in guilt-based wellness (or passing that on to her kids). ‘Butter’ is her shorthand for real food wellness.

That’s what caught my attention. In a world full of functional proteins, longevity hacks, microbiome optimizers, and metabolic tracking, ‘butter’ is the word some women are choosing to represent a calmer, more grounded approach to eating.

And I see the rest of culture coming to meet them. TikTok is drowning in butter right now. Butter-dipped soft serve. Viral Japanese pancakes served with hand-patted sticks of butter. Influencers talking about the health halo of grass-fed, raw, and regenerative butter.

Butter isn’t just having a moment, it’s becoming a cultural nexus, the ingredient where several independent threads converge: anti-processed sentiment, MAHA nutrition logic, intuitive eating, whole-food minimalism, and a hunger for sensory joy.

It’s that combination that makes me think that butter is one of the most under-reported trends heading into 2026. Let me explain.

The Case for Butter: Four Forces

1. Shock & Attention (Social Media Currency)

For decades, butter was the villain. Saturated fat would kill you, “heart attack on a plate,” all of that. We were lectured into believing margarine was nutritional progress and butter was what took down the Greatest Generation.

Which is why a video of Dominque Ansel dipping a soft-serve cone into melted butter still hits with visceral force. Real shock value. But unlike the Liver King gnawing on organs, butter’s shock isn’t so much grotesque as it is intriguing. It’s rebellion that looks tasty.

Butter’s transgression works because it sits in the sweet spot: outrageous enough to stop your scroll, familiar enough to make you hungry. It’s naughty and nice at the same time, a rare combo that algorithmically performs.

What is interesting is that what starts as internet excess quickly becomes normalized. Once people watch food being dipped, drizzled and doused for entertainment, butter in everyday products suddenly starts feelings OK again. The spectacle is softening the taboo but leaving the thrill.

2. Wellness Purity (MAHA-Era Positioning)

Here’s where butter intersects with the anti-processed movement. Against the backdrop of industrial processed oils, butter is radically simple. Just cream (maybe salt).

In the MAHA worldview, the healthiest foods are the ones with the shortest path from nature to plate. In a marketplace full of sunny seed oils with suspicious factory backstories, butter is understandable and trustable.

Butter’s simplicity now functions as a form of moral clarity. Grass-fed, regenerative, raw, these aren’t just premium descriptors, they’re signals that butter aligns with ancestral and traditional nutrition logic. The “butter mom” movement isn’t really about butter, it’s about rejecting the idea that modern wellness has to be joyless and hyper-controlled.

As MAHA voices gain power and saturated fats get re-evaluated, I believe butter’s symbolic weight will grow.

There is tension, though. Commodity butter can feel processed and corporate, especially when packaged like margarine’s cousin. That’s why emerging wellness brands are distancing themselves from conventional butter and leaning into “back to the farm” language. The story matters as much as the fat itself. (I have a lot more to say on this issue, get in touch if you want to chat).

3. Indulgence (Permission Structure)

Everyone knows butter tastes amazing. Butter is a flavor amplifier! It makes plain things craveable (see mashed potatoes or bread).

What’s new is the permission structure forming around that indulgence. MAHA logic reframes butter as nutrient-dense, satiating, ancestral, not sinful. You see this especially in influencer nutrition content: butter is no longer the thing you hide, it’s the thing you showcase.

Think of where dark chocolate landed about fifteen years ago. Chocolate went from a sinful treat to a healthy indulgence-with-benefits. Butter may be entering that phase now.

Tallow might have gotten the early MAHA attention, but how many people do you know who have deep emotional ties to tallow? Butter has taste memory, childhood nostalgia, and is “home cooking” coded. Let’s put it this way, no one praises a food by saying its ‘tallowy.’

4. Affordable Luxury

Butter isn’t cheap, but it’s becoming one of the few luxuries consumers are refusing to give up when budgets tighten. Some are saying butter now falls into lipstick luxury. When everything feels unstable (groceries, rent, work, the world) a better butter is a small, daily comfort that makes life feel less compromised.

That’s already showing up in behavior. NPR recently reported on consumers spending up to sixty dollars a pound for specialty butters. To me that indicates butter’s power even during a downturn (at least in a K-shaped economy).

When indulgence, purity, shock value, and affordability converge, you get a cultural accelerant. Butter is sitting right at that intersection and I think it will get much bigger in 2026.

So What?

Let me put this all together now.

Butter is turning into a cultural shorthand for “real,” “trusted,” “unprocessed,” and “worth savoring.” I can’t stress enough how rare it is for one ingredient to hold symbolic power and functional value at the same time. That makes butter a brand-building tool, not just a formulation choice.

Consumers are increasingly judging products by the fats they use, and butter is becoming the gold standard for signaling simplicity, honesty, and sensory payoff, without falling into the traps of ultra-processing or joyless wellness.

Where Brands Can Play

1. Audit your fats
Would swapping canola or sunflower oil for butter actually resonate with your audience? Is it technically feasible? Would it make the product taste better? If yes, there might be a meaningful story to tell here.

2. Choose your butter identity
As mentioned, mass-produced butter might not carry the full weight of symbolism needed for your consumer. Consider:

grass-fed
regenerative
organic
raw
cultured
brown butter
ghee

3. Lean into indulgent-wellness hybrids
For everything from bars, bites, breakfast items, functional snacks, and refrigerated doughs, butter creates the bridge between “clean ingredients” and sensory joy.

4. Put butter back on the label
“Made with real butter” suddenly has credibility again. If you can, shout it loudly.

5. Create the ‘butter version’ in your category
Every mature category has a premium slot waiting for a butter-forward SKU:

snack bars with butter instead of seed oils
frozen breakfast with visible butter cues
butter-rich savory snacks
refrigerated bakery with butter positioning

First mover wins the conversation.

6. Use butter as an aesthetic
Even if it’s not the hero ingredient, butter’s visual language (golds, creams, slow melts) signals warmth, nostalgia, taste, and minimal processing.

7. Post-purchase addition

If you can’t put butter into your product, can you have the consumer do it? Yes, we all know about adding butter to a cake mix but I urge you to think bigger. I’ll prompt you with this awesome 80s Cheerios ad.

Products: Just Foods Power Jacks; Sprinkle Bites Protein Sprinkles; Sturdy Sauce Protein Marinara; Magic Spoon Hot Chocolate Cereal; Quantum Energy Caffeinated Protein Squares; V8 Spicy Cajun; Control Freak Coffee; Hormel Black Label Frank’s Red Hot Bacon; Liquid IV Hot Chocolate Electrolyte Drink Mix; Sour Punch Pickle Straws; Jimmy John’s Pickle Menu

The Intensity Economy: Why Everything is More and Nothing is Enough

Does pasta sauce need 80g of protein? Do people want more electrolytes and more caffeine in their drinks? Why is every brand racing to be ‘hotter’ or ‘more sour’ than the next?

It’s not just the stock market that seems to be riding extreme (and potentially dangerous) highs right now, I think it’s increasingly our approach to…well everything. Welcome to the Intensity Economy: where “more” has become the only direction food culture knows how to move.

I’ve been asking myself, why is everything going up?

We’ve Gone Numb

I call it ‘sensation inflation.’ TikTok scrolling has gotten us all used to the need for increased stimulation. Every reel needs to ‘up’ the excitement to deliver the same amount of dopamine; our excitement sensors are being recalibrated. So, it’s not surprising when Tastewise reported that “intense flavor” is driving spending up 53.4% year-over-year across baking, snacks, and condiments.

When normal levels aren’t breaking through the noise anymore, we need bigger hits. This translates into unprecedented levels of heat, spice, and sour flavors, sometimes to painful levels (as the pleasure pathways become exhausted).

The Measurability Trap

When it comes specifically to functional ingredients, we are in a similar situation, but for slightly different reasons. Brands trying to pack more protein, more creatine, and more vitamins into every bite and sip comes from:

Control through counting: When everything feels chaotic and uncertain, grams and percentages offer a concrete decision. “30g protein” is knowable. “Nourishing” is not.

Optimization theater: More protein signals you’re doing something about your health without requiring deeper engagement with what your body actually needs. It’s signaling to yourself, visible proof you made the “better” choice.

The productivity export: We’ve imported workplace logic into eating. Just as you’re supposed to maximize your productivity per hour, you should maximize nutrition per calorie. Nutrition becomes a KPI. Every meal is now a performance review.

Brand-side escalation: When every brand offers protein, the only way to differentiate on shelf is to offer MORE protein. It’s cheaper to reformulate for 25g than to rebuild your entire brand story. The number is the story. And once one brand goes to 25g, everyone else needs 27g or 30g just to stay visible. It’s an arms race where nobody can afford to be left behind.

The logic becomes self-reinforcing: If 15g is good, 20g must be better. If 20g is better, 30g must be best. There’s no natural ceiling when “more” is the only legible improvement and the easiest claim to make.

The Coming Market Correction

Here’s where the stock market metaphor matters. I see the Intensity Economy behaving exactly like a speculative bubble. Everyone is assuming ‘up’ is the only direction and that we’ll be in this climb forever.

I don’t think so.

Just like with stock markets, there must be a point where a ceiling is reached, where we don’t see deflation but the bubble bursting.

I see the following early warning signs of a coming collapse:

Clean eating advocates are pushing back against ultra-processed foods. No matter how ‘clean’ a product claims to be, if it contains massive amounts of protein far beyond its normal level, it’s a UPF
Multiple states (and the MAHA-led federal government) are now proposing bans on food additives and chemicals, putting many flavor intensity methods in jeopardy
“High protein” has shifted from novelty to expectation. It’s no longer a differentiator, just table stakes. When everyone has 25g, no one stands out. The premium is evaporating.
GLP-1 medications are quietly reshaping appetites and taste buds. Smaller bites are starting to be better and extreme heat may not be on the menu. While higher protein makes sense here, a balance of macros is more likely in order.
Flavor fatigue is setting in. A recent Mintel x Black Swan report shows consumers seeking complexity over mere intensity, they want interesting, not just extreme. The treadmill to ‘more’ is getting harder to sell.

The question isn’t whether this breaks. It’s when (and what replaces it).

Three Plays for Brands

Move from extremes to complexity: As I mentioned above, extreme is not the answer consumers are looking for. Don’t go hotter or sour-er, just more interesting. Add layers, contrast, and dimensions instead of more of the same.

Give function some context (and a reality check): Not every food needs to carry a full day’s worth of protein. Match the benefit to the moment instead of chasing the highest number on shelf. If you can show people WHY it’s not right for their body to have that much protein in one meal (and what’s ideal), you can change your brand from the one delivering the most to the one that delivers the smartest.

Dial it in, don’t dial it up: Heat, sour, caffeine, protein, they all land better when they’re in proportion to the food, not maxed out for shock value. Talk about balance instead of extremes.

Use texture and contrast as the “new intensity:” Crunch, creaminess, warmth, coolness. Instead of ramping of flavors or nutrients, be the one that offers the best textures at a moderate volume.