Agri-Mark, the Waitsfield company that owns Cabot Creamery, issued a voluntary recall for a single lot of Cabot Creamery premium butter this week.
The recall, announced on Wednesday, April 9, was due to internal “finished product testing revealing an elevated level of coliform bacteria,” the company said in a statement. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration classified the recall as Class III, the least serious of its recall classifications. The affected products are “not very likely to cause adverse health consequences,” according to the FDA.
Only 17 retail packages, or 8.5 pounds, of the affected product — Cabot Creamery 8oz Extra Creamy Premium Butter, Sea Salted — were sold to consumers, though all of those packages were sold in Vermont. A Cabot representative told Seven Days on Friday that the company is “not able to share the locations” where those 17 affected packages were sold.
Agri-Mark “successfully recovered 99.5%” of the recalled product before it was sold, the company said. No other products were affected, and no complaints or illnesses have been reported.
News of the recall quickly went national, including a story in the New York Times and a Fox News story headlined, “‘Extra creamy’ butter recalled due to stomach-churning bacterial contamination.'”
“There have been a variety of news reports that are incomplete and have dramatically misrepresented this recall with respect to the risk it posed to consumers,” Agri-Mark’s statement said.
Coliform is a family of bacteria “common in soil, plants, and intestinal tracts of humans and animals,” according to the Vermont Department of Health. The family includes fecal coliform such as E. coli, but the presence of E. coli would trigger a more severe recall. The type of coliform found while testing the butter was not specified in the FDA’s enforcement report.
The recall was classified by the FDA on April 8, nearly two weeks after Agri-Mark initiated the process on March 26.
Consumers who recently purchased the butter — which is sold in cardboard packages containing two sticks — should check the box for the following details:
Expiration date: 09/09/25
Code: 072 or 073
Time stamp range: 22:00-00:30.
Affected products should be disposed of or returned to the store where they were purchased.