Yeah, I work in a restaurant and allergies are a real issue that we deal with nearly every day. There is no such thing as being "too cautious" when you are dealing with the literal life and death of another human.

My grandma, in her 86 years of life, still needs to check to see if butter has milk in it. She is the use case you mention that we take for granted! (Although at least the only real fallout of her blunder is indigestion and what she does to my bathroom when she visits and has lactose :x)

Now, you and me, we know that butter is made from milk or cream, but only a great fool would assume everyone knows what they know.

In this day and age of vegan "dairy" products, including butter and cheese (not to mention margarines), I don't think you can even reasonably assume butter has to have milk in it. Because there is a greater than 0% chance it doesn't.

Thanks for the informative post. I was all ready to poke fun at this move.

Hang on a minute. My entire life there have been ingredients lists on food products, usually under the nutrition facts grid. More recently I've seen additional language on packaging that says something like "Warning: Contains nuts." Did they fail to put that "Warning: Contains milk" on there, or did they omit the ingredients list entirely (which, for butter, should be cream and maybe salt). Like...?

I also wonder if they'll be able to put the same butter into corrected packaging and still sell it.

That's probably what will happen -- stickers and restock.

For stuff still on the shelf, probably. For stuff already sold, no so much.

A lot of things, actually. Milk is so clearly and consistently marked as an allergen that I'll often as a vegan just check the allergens if I don't have any reason to suspect the use of meat products, meat byproducts, honey, or non-allergenic dairy ingredients.

I would probably still do a double-take and check the ingredients here, but with the movement to plant-based alternatives, you never know if someone who treats this the same way I do as basically a gold standard (because that's what it's supposed to be) will simply take it at face value. It's also plausible that someone without strong English literacy but with such an allergy would rely solely on the basic allergen label rather than trying to parse more complicated English words.

The reason it has to be strictly enforced like this too is that if you justify this as "well everyone knows ~~it's Butters~~ butter, so it doesn't really need a label", then it's not as trustworthy and therefore efficient to those who need it, and it risks drawing a line where not everyone is on the same page.

Next you'll tell me that brown sugar isn't just brown sugar and table salt isn't just salt!

i promise to put it all to good use

You're going to take a butter bath, aren't you?

It won't say cow dairy so they can still get off on a technicality!

The churning process isn't 100% effective at removing water, proteins, etc, so people that are allergic to milk can also react to butter. The milk isn't "milk" anymore, but it would be more confusing to say "contains milk fats, proteins, sugars, enzymes, hormones, antibodies, mucins and minerals", IMO.