Opinion – Cozinha Bruta: Margarina Doriana launches ‘vegetable butter’ for the stupid consumer

I came across a product on the market that really intrigued me.

The brand is Doriana, which was once the most famous margarine in Brazil, today manufactured by the multitentacular JBS. But the word “margarine” doesn’t appear on the lid or front of the package; on the back, it comes in microscopic letters. Larger letters are reserved for the expression “plant butter”.

“Plant butter” – plant butter, in English. But what is vegetable butter if not margarine?

The thing is even more curious with a seal, printed on the lid and on the front, with the warning that it is a 100% vegetable product. So it’s. It is a product intended for the vegan public.

I, who don’t consume margarine, thought that this vegetable fat was always vegan. Then I went to look at the other brands in the fridge and saw that almost all of them have a little powdered milk in their composition. To mimic, even remotely, the taste of butter.

One of the brands does not add milk or declare itself vegan. I looked in the fine print: MAY CONTAIN MILK. This means that the product shares machinery with items that carry milk – the margarine, therefore, may be contaminated with traces of dairy foods.

The margarine market is a very bizarre thing. They emerged as a cheaper alternative to butter and, for a long time, were thought to be healthier. There they penetrated the shopping lists of the wealthier classes.

When it was proved that they are more harmful to health than butter – and uselessly bad from a gastronomic point of view – the only remaining attraction was the price.

The rich don’t care about the word “margarine.” It’s a poor thing, and being in the same basket as the poor is the thing that the rich Brazilian hates most.

So the manufacturers tried to hide the “margarine” in the packaging. They left it small, there in a corner, because the law forces them to say what they are selling. But they don’t use it in any advertising.

Rico does not consume margarine, but a “vegetable cream” sometimes passes through his sieve. Even more so if it comes with omega-3 and/or has the approval of a chef. They created margarines with the addition of butter and cream.

You can’t add butter to a vegan product, so what do you do? Calling it “margarine” is out of the question, as nearly every vegan is wealthy — and just as demophobic as their “carnist” peers. The solution is to sell plant butter.

This cannot be done because of legal obstacles, at least in Portuguese. So let it be done in English. Every vegan is bilingual, if not polyglot. In English it is more beautiful, more chic, more salesman.

The most bizarre thing about Doriana’s “plant butter” packaging is not that the word “margarine” is much smaller than “butter” in a vegan food. It’s the fact that the word “margarine” is much more discreet than the letter “T”, for “transgenic”, which the manufacturer is obliged to print inside a yellow triangle to warn that it uses genetically modified soy.

To differentiate itself once and for all from other margarines, “plant butter” uses an old strategy in the market for the A class: it drives the price up high. At the same refrigerated counter, the regular Doriana cost R$9.49 against R$14.89 for the vegan little sister. For the same 500 grams, vegan margarine is 57% more expensive.

As long as there are suckers who buy such products, the smart-ass who create them will never lose money.

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