RETAILING BUTTER

Taranaki Daily News, 1 June 1935, Page 24 (Supplement)

RETAILING BUTTER

EVASION OF MARKING SOME PRACTICES REVEALED. The misdescription of retail products is again in the news. The newly-form-ed Retail Trading Standards Association is at present engaged in establishing codes for the accurate marking of wares in the clothing, drapery, china and glass and furniture trades, and may possibly extend its activities to. the provision trade, says a London correspondent writing on April 16. The practice among northern grocers of retailing- cheap foreign butter, including Siberian, as “best Kiel butter” was brought before the notice of the Minister of Agriculture a few days ago by Sir John Haslam, M.P., for Bolton, and ex-president of the Grocers’ Federation. Sir John, who was invited by Mr. Elliot to submit evidence of definite evasion of the Marking Order, has also written to northern newspapers and to the trade press pointing out that the description of butter which has been packed in barrels or “kiels” as “best Kiel butter” is no longer a guarantee of quality. “It will surely be a reflection oq the good sense of northern, housewives,” he says, “if, in the face of these revelations, they continue to neglect the butter which is offered them from the farm basket or the Empire box, merely because of some imaginary virture in the barrel.”

How some New Zealand butter is sold is indicated by a statement made at a recent meeting of the National Farmers’ Union of England. Producing three separate packets of well-known proprietary brands of butter a member drew attention to the smallness of the printing on the packages of the words J‘inciuding imported.” He said New Zealand butter could be purchased wholesale at 7d a pound, yet the proprietary brands were sold at Is 2d to Is 4d, and no one knew what percentage of English • butter was in them. The meeting carried a resolution demanding that no proprietary brands of butter should include imported butter.