About Us

How We Got Started

Assortment of 4 Butters
In 2012, armed with nothing more than a few 19th century dairy journals, a small mixer and a passion for simple and natural foods, Drew and his wife Elizabeth embarked on a journey that would bring hand-crafted, deep-flavored butter to food lovers across the country. With plenty of encouragement from friends and family, Drew and Elizabeth began selling tiny runs of Banner Butter at a few farmers’ markets around Atlanta. Today, Banner Butter maintains its small-batch approach to butter making while selling to select stores across the Southeast, to Mid-Atlantic and Southeast Whole Foods, Earth Fare, Erewhon Markets, and more.

We’re not them.

While industrial-scale butters are made with unripened cream and added “natural” flavoring, Banner Butter, a small-batch butter, is made with patiently-cultured cream from hormone-free, grass-fed cows with no added flavoring.

We go big, but only in taste.
Everything else is small, simple, and slow.

How We’re Different

Third, the butterfat. We make butter that has a higher proportion of butterfat than other butters.

Fourth, is the method. Before churning, we let the cream ripen for many, many hours. This ripening process allows good bacteria to form. It is this good bacteria that gives butter its complex buttery undertones.

Finally, our butter is hand-cut and lovingly packaged. That’s why no two packages look exactly the same. In the end, it takes us 20 times longer to make our butter than industrial-scale butters.

We’re different in several ways. First, the cream. It’s fresh. Like, really fresh. That’s because it comes from Georgia cows, local to us.

Second, it’s grass-fed. Our cows graze in green pastures and are not treated with hormones.

After the cream ripens, we slowly churn it in small batches. This process results in a better-tasting product because we are able to make small adjustments throughout churning, depending on the season, the consistency, and the taste of the cream.

These steps create a deep rich flavor and out-of-the-package creaminess you can’t get anywhere else.
We offer unsalted and salted butter plus various sweet and savory compound butter that help make meal time tastier and easier for you!

Grass-fed Cows

We use cream from local cows graze on small farms in green pastures. Free-ranging cows tend to live longer, healthier lives and produce wonderfully flavorful cream.

A healthy share of grass in the cows’ diet not only pleases their taste buds, it increases conjugated linoleic acids, vitamin E, beta-carotene, and omega-3 fatty acids in the milk they produce, thereby benefitting the oh-so-lucky consumer.

Our dairy farms also never dose their cows with hormones to increase milk production, a practice that can cause health problems in cows and humans alike.

Cultured Butter

The vast majority of butter sold in America is sweet cream butter. That means it is immediately churned after the cream is pasteurized.  That also means that it has very little taste. So, to give it flavor, many butter manufacturers add “natural flavoring” or “lactic acid.”

Butter churned from sweet cream lacks the flavors that can only come from a long-ripening process where a special mixture of bacteria is added to the cream and held at precisely the right temperature for the right amount of time. This good bacteria is one of the things that make our butter taste so good.

Compound Butters

We start with our small-batch cultured butter as a base, and then we add different ingredients to it to make cooking easier and mix things up a bit. Examples of some compound butters we sell are a Roasted Garlic, Basil, Parsley butter; a Cinnamon Cardamom Ginger butter; and a Balsamic Fig and Caramelized Onion butter. In the end, compounds take your butter – and consequently your whole meal — up a notch, to something you just don’t want to miss.