Trader Joe’s Vegan Buttery Spread Review

I am a butter guy. Real butter, on everything, preferably too much of it. So it’s a little embarrassing to admit that the tub I reach for every morning now is vegan.

Let me explain how we got here.

One of my kids went vegan in college. When he comes home to visit I like to cook for him, and honestly I treat it like a puzzle. How do you make food taste like food when half your pantry is suddenly off limits? Eggs, gone. Cheese, gone. Butter, the foundation of pretty much everything I cook, gone.

So I grabbed a tub of Trader Joe’s Organic Buttery Spread expecting it to be fine. Serviceable. The kind of thing you put up with because you love your kid. At $3.99 for 13 ounces it felt like a pretty small bet.

My son has since gone back to school. The tub is still in my fridge and I keep buying new ones.

(For the skimmers: it’s vegan, dairy free, gluten free, kosher and organic. More on all of that below.)

Why can’t they just call it butter?

You’ll notice it isn’t called vegan butter. It’s a “buttery spread.” That’s not Trader Joe’s being cute. In the US butter has a legal definition, and it has to be at least 80% milkfat. No milk, no butter. So every plant based version on the shelf gets stuck with a name that sounds like it’s apologizing for something.

This one doesn’t need to apologize. It looks like butter, spreads like butter and melts into hot toast like butter. Becky and I have tried it side by side with regular store brand butter and we honestly can’t tell which is which.

Can I tell the difference between this and a really good European butter like Plugra or Kerrygold? Yes, I’m not delusional. Those have a richness and a little tang that’s hard to fake. But compared to the everyday butter most of us actually buy, it’s a dead ringer.

It reminds me of the big margarine tubs we had growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, back when butter was temporarily cancelled for health reasons. Except that stuff tasted like yellow candle wax and this tastes good. Think of it as margarine 2.0.

The cookie experiment

Toast was the easy test. Baking was the real one, because baking is where substitutes go to die.

I made a batch of plain old chocolate chip cookies for my son using my regular recipe with two swaps. This spread went in wherever the recipe called for butter, one for one. A flax egg replaced the egg. If you’ve never made a flax egg, it’s just ground flaxseed stirred into water and left to sit for a few minutes until it turns gloopy. It sounds sketchy and it works surprisingly well.

The cookies were great. Gooey, chocolatey, and they held together exactly like regular chocolate chip cookies. No weird crumbly edges, no sad flat puddles on the sheet pan. I’m not sure anyone could have picked them out of a lineup against my usual batch. I sure couldn’t. My son got real homemade cookies, I got to feel like a decent parent, and nobody had to eat a dry, sandy “healthy” cookie out of politeness. Everybody wins.

One tip if you bake with it: this spread has a lower melting point than butter and softens fast at room temperature. Keep it cold until you need it, and chilling the dough before it goes in the oven is a good idea. A heavy sheet pan helps too. The thin, warped ones heat unevenly and burn the bottoms before the middles are done, and with a softer fat you want every advantage you can get.

Where it really shines

Baking works, but in our house this stuff lives on toast. Morning toast, English muffins, a warm slice of sourdough when nobody’s looking. It spreads straight from the fridge, which is more than I can say for real butter. Real butter tears your bread in half unless you remembered to leave it out, and I never remember to leave it out.

That softness has a downside, though. Leave it on the counter on a warm afternoon and it gets a little soupy. It belongs in the fridge, lid on, and it’ll be ready to spread whenever you are.

What’s actually in it

It’s a blend of organic coconut, palm fruit, canola, sunflower and flaxseed oils, plus water, sea salt, sunflower lecithin, natural flavor, and annatto for that yellow color. Nothing weird.

A tablespoon has 80 calories, 9 grams of fat and 80 mg of sodium. That’s a little lighter than regular butter, which is around 100 calories a tablespoon. Let’s be real, this is not health food. It’s fat. But it’s plant fat, there’s no cholesterol, and it tastes like the thing you actually wanted.

The dietary checklist (the big selling point)

This is where it gets really useful for anyone cooking for a mixed crowd.

It’s vegan, dairy free, gluten free and organic. There’s no soy in it either, which is nice, because plenty of plant based spreads lean on soybean oil. And it’s kosher. From what I can tell it’s certified pareve, meaning it contains no meat or dairy, so under kosher rules it can go alongside a meat meal, which real butter can’t. Double check the symbol on your tub, but if you keep kosher and want buttery mashed potatoes next to a brisket, this is your answer.

If you’ve got a vegan kid, someone at the table with a dairy allergy, or a kosher relative coming for Thanksgiving, one tub covers all of them. That’s a lot of problems solved for four bucks.

Heads up: TJ’s sells two vegan butters

Don’t grab the wrong one. Trader Joe’s also sells a Vegan Buttery Spread that comes as a block instead of a tub. It’s made in Germany with shea butter and fava bean protein, and TJ’s pitches it as a one for one butter replacement. I haven’t done a side by side bake off yet, so I can’t tell you which one bakes better. For everyday spreading, the organic tub is what we buy.

Is it worth the money?

At $3.99 for 13 ounces, yes. Name brand organic plant based spreads can cost close to double that at other grocery stores. Compared to a pound of decent butter, you’re paying little or no premium to make your kitchen friendly to basically every diet that walks through the door.

Quick answers

Is Trader Joe’s Organic Buttery Spread vegan? Yes, and dairy free too.

Is it gluten free? Yes.

Is it kosher? Yes, and it appears to be pareve. Check the tub.

Can you bake with it? Yes. We swapped it one for one for butter in chocolate chip cookies and couldn’t tell the difference. Just keep it cold.

Does it taste like butter? On toast, close enough that we can’t tell the difference.

The verdict

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 9/10

Price: $3.99 for 13 oz

Dietary: Vegan, dairy free, gluten free, kosher, organic

Best For: Vegans, dairy free households, families cooking for mixed diets, and anyone who wants butter that spreads straight from the fridge

Skip If: You’re a Kerrygold loyalist who considers all substitutes an act of war

I bought this for my vegan kid. I’m the one who can’t stop using it. Sometimes the student becomes the teacher, and the teacher becomes the guy eating vegan butter on purpose.