Kepie Watch / NZ-Made Watch
NZ-Made Watch
17 of 18 butters in our pool carry the NZ-made marker.
The cheapest block carrying the NZ-made marker and the cheapest without one, on the same shelf at each supermarket.
PAK'nSAVE
7 of 8 butter products we measure here carry the NZ-made marker on packaging.
Cheapest labelled NZ-made
Cheapest labelled NZ-made
Pure Butter
Pams
$16.60/kg
as a 500g pack, $8.29
Measured at PAK'nSAVE on .
SKU 5023660-EA-000
Cheapest not labelled NZ-made
Cheapest not labelled NZ-made
Butter
Rolling Meadow
$19.40/kg
as a 500g pack, $9.69
Measured at PAK'nSAVE on .
SKU 5004821-EA-000
The pack labelled NZ-made costs $0.28 less per 100g here.
Woolworths
10 of 10 butter products we measure here carry the NZ-made marker on packaging.
Cheapest labelled NZ-made
Cheapest labelled NZ-made
woolworths butter salted
woolworths
$16.80/kg
as a 500g pack, $8.39
Measured at Woolworths on .
SKU 827847
Cheapest not labelled NZ-made
Every butter SKU in the pool at Woolworths this week carries the NZ-made marker.
Why this matters
New Zealand is a major dairy exporter, and that exporter scale shapes what we pay at home. Local butteron NZ shelves often tracks export prices rather than domestic cost-of-production — the long-running Fonterra debate is the cultural backdrop here, not something we’re endorsing or relitigating.
“Same shelf. Same butter. One carries the NZ-made marker, one doesn’t.”
Kepie Watch · Issue 001
What we can show: at each supermarket this week, what does the cheapest SKU carrying the NZ-made marker actually cost, and is there a cheaper pack on the same shelf without that marker? Sometimes there is. Sometimes the labelled-NZ option is the same money. Both facts are worth seeing on their own.
A note on language: we read the packaging marker, not a customs form. A pack without an explicit NZ-made claim isn’t necessarily made overseas — many NZ retailer house brands source locally without saying so on the front of pack. We say “not labelled NZ-made” rather than guess at origin.