Black market butter: What’s behind the recent string of dairy thefts?

The case of the missing butter remains a mystery, but some have ideas on what’s behind the unusual crimes.

As shoplifting rises in grocery stores amid Canada’s cost-of-living crisis, police and a few industry experts say thieves have taken particular interest in the product.

Recent large-scale thefts of butter — worth thousands of dollars in total — have baffled police in two southwestern Ontario cities.

There have been nine notable thefts at grocery stores and chain retailers in Guelph, Ont., since December 2023, and last month, police in Brantford, Ont., said thieves made off with about $1,200 worth of butter from a local grocery store.

It’s not the first time bars of all-dairy edible gold have gone missing. In 2018, a B.C. RCMP detachment announced that $1,400 worth of the stuff had been lifted from a grocery store in Coquitlam, according to a pun-laden media release at the time.

“I’m sure it’s happening everywhere, quite frankly,” Scott Tracey, spokesperson for Guelph Police Service, said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca on Friday. “It’s quite surprising, to me anyway. There is a bit of a black market.”

While police can’t provide details about ongoing investigations into this suspected black market, Tracey said he has personally seen advertisements on Facebook Marketplace for what appear to be illicit butter.

“There does appear to be a black market, for whatever reason, whether it’s the cost of the item or some people also use a lot of butter, depending what kind of business they’re in,” he said.

Thieves are also targeting expensive grocery items such as steak, seafood and baby products, Tracey said, adding that in those cases, they appear to be stolen for personal use.

The butter, he suspects, is sold for profit, and though the prospective buyers remain unknown, it’s notable that the alleged after-market product appears only to undercut retail prices by a few dollars.

Even as inflation cools, experts believe butter thefts will continue to be a problem as long as the cost of living and food prices remain high.

“I think the inflationary pressure we’ve seen in the last three years, with 20 per cent increases in food prices on average, has clearly increased the pressure on not only businesses, but on Canadians generally and led to an increase in these sorts of thefts,” Mike von Massow, a University of Guelph food economist, said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca on Thursday.

Thieves are targeting all kinds of food, not just butter, von Massow said, because of the high prices.

That said, von Massow said the butter thieves are likely not ordinary customers.

“This isn’t people putting butter in their pockets or a steak down their pants,” he said. “This is organized theft of larger quantities.”

Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, says several criminal groups may be behind the butter thefts, but because many cases go unreported, it’s difficult to determine the size of the illegal market.

“It’s organized crime, basically, because you don’t steal that amount of butter unless you actually can find a black market for it,” Charlebois told CTVNews.ca in a video interview Wednesday. “And there’s a black market for butter, like that, given the fact that butter is now way more expensive than it used to (be).”

Butter prices have surged by nearly 50 per cent over the past four years, Charlebois said, with rising butterfat costs for dairy processors driving retail prices increasingly higher. And while he says the increase itself isn’t surprising, the amount of butter stolen does raise eyebrows.

“It appears as though butter has attracted organized criminals much more so than other products,” Charlebois said.

Butter is a relatively easy target for thieves, Charlebois added, as each unit is small, light and easy to preserve in a freezer for up to a year.

Restaurants, bakers and other customers grappling with higher costs will find cheaper butter appealing, he said.

“If someone actually knocks on your door and offers you some really good butter at a discount, and there’s no traces at all, then probably, you’ll be tempted to buy some,” Charlebois said.

Restaurants Canada, a Toronto-based non-profit group that advocates for the industry, said it hasn’t heard from its members about a problem with the butter black market.

“We would advise any restaurants that are unsure where the product is coming from to research their suppliers and be careful of deals that seem too good to be true,” it said in an emailed statement to CTVNews.ca on Friday.

From groceries and pharmaceutical items to alcohol, thieves have been targeting products beyond butter across all retail sectors nationwide for the past few years, says Matt Poirier, spokesperson for the Retail Council of Canada, a Toronto-based non-profit that represents retailers.

“We’re certainly seeing a rise in crime, often at the hands of organized crime, and it’s becoming very dangerous and very violent,” Poirier said in a phone interview with CTVNews.ca on Friday, noting the crime often involves armed thieves.

The problem is only getting worse not just with the number of crimes but also with the violence, he said.

“It’s not simply shoplifting anymore, but it’s very violent organized crime rings that are committing these crimes,” he added.

The scope of the problem is similar across the country, whether rural or urban, in the East or West, he said.

As for solutions, von Massow said increasing security could help prevent thefts, noting governments can do little to lower prices.

More businesses are concerned about theft, so suppliers of loss-prevention technology have seen increased sales, Charlebois said.

Businesses are investing a lot of money – sometimes even millions of dollars for just one retailer — for security measures, including hiring more security guards and adding more sensor tags for items, Poirier said.

“The problem is so bad and they don’t have a choice,” he said. “Those (security) costs just drive up the price in everything as a result.”

Retailers are working very closely with police forces nationwide to combat the problem, Poirier added.

With files from CTV News’ Kendra Mangione