In the back of a small shop in a nondescript industrial park, a metal box the size of a kitchen island is humming. And clanking softly. And, well, slooshing.
And he's right: In a moment, the box stops swishing and starts thudding, like fingers thumping gently on a taut water balloon. McBath cuts the power, raises the lid, and displays what he's been waiting for: a gleaming, craggy swath of butter, rising out of a froth of buttermilk.
It isn't much butter—the high-tech churn processes just 25 gallons of cream—but Banner Butter isn't focused on quantity. This startup in an anonymous Atlanta suburb aims to reframe butter, from suspect commodity to golden glory, one small batch at a time.
On the surface, the success of Banner—which produces about 400 pounds per week of plain and seasoned butter, sold in local stores and offered on some Delta Airlines flights—represents both a tasty product and earnest effort by a couple who have been preparing to do this for years. (According to Beth, Drew started stashing seed money while he was in business school, in 1998.) But it also indicates a fundamental change in how we think about saturated fat.
For decades, butter and animal fats were the enemy, accused of causing heart disease and obesity and excised from the American diet by scientific certainty and federal proscription. Now, the science has shifted, the government has reconsidered, and butter is starring on magazine covers and in books and even in coffee. Banner Butter was perfectly timed.
The McBaths—who both have day jobs; he's a business analyst, she's a prosecutor—began their journey into better butter two years ago. Drew had always wanted to own a food business, and they thought they saw a niche, making compound butters with fresh, unusual flavors that could be served on toast or melted on a steak. A year later, in April 2014, they transitioned to making their own butter, modeled after farm butters they tasted on a research trip to France.
The McBaths, who make Banner Butter blending technology with old-fashioned technique. Photo courtesy Sweet Peach.
It's not only the science of butter that the McBaths see themselves retrieving, though. Both come from Georgia families, and Beth still has her great-grandmother's wooden churn. When they make their butter, they feel as though they are reclaiming history, restoring a once-treasured food to its rightful place.