The Butter Conditioner: A Small Appliance With a Very Big Fan Club

I wrote this in 2016 or 2017 during the two years I lived in New Zealand. Some details — prices, hours, what’s open — may have changed, but the experience and my love for this place haven’t.

Our new apartment comes with a refrigerator that is awesome — one of those hidden fridges that looks like a cabinet. The kitchen cabinets are showing some wear and tear but we don’t mind. The cool factor is very much there.

The day we moved in, my partner and step-daughter were thrilled to discover we have a butter conditioner. I asked what on earth a butter conditioner was. Apparently it’s a small compartment inside the fridge with its own temperature control — warmer than the rest of the fridge but cooler than room temperature — so your butter stays perfectly soft and spreadable at all times. Until recently, many refrigerators sold in New Zealand featured one of these as standard.

My refrigerators in the US had a little door for butter too, but nothing temperature controlled. You have to really hate hard butter to go through that kind of engineering.

Here’s where it gets interesting though. People in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand were so attached to their butter conditioners that when manufacturers started phasing them out, there was genuine outrage. The NZ Herald ran a story about a man named Gary Black who was so upset that his new fridge didn’t have one that he wrote a letter of complaint to Fisher & Paykel in strong language, copied it to Federated Farmers, and it ended up published in the farming magazine Straight Furrow — after which people were stopping him in the street to congratulate him on his stand. Fisher & Paykel wrote back explaining that having a heating device inside a cooling appliance was counterproductive and affected their ability to meet Australian energy standards. This did not satisfy anyone.

People believe butter conditioners were part of their national identity. Which makes sense actually — New Zealand’s entire economy was built on dairy. Soft butter isn’t just a convenience here. It’s almost a point of pride.

The story has a modern twist too. An Auckland engineer has spent years developing a benchtop butter conditioner called Smoothly, controlled via smartphone app, that keeps your butter at your precise preferred spreadability. Because of course he has.

Maybe I’m just not used to having real butter. Or maybe I’ve been spreading cold, hard butter my whole life and didn’t know what I was missing.