Butter £1 in sainsburys

[bacon]

Sainbos are doing Countrylife for £1 from £1.50 a pat. This is the cheapest I can find as usually buy 4-5 pats when I go. Good saving.

Lidl always have butter for around 1 not the best for toast etc but great for baking

Can someone explain to me what is going on with the pricing of butter. They quite often manage to drop the price from £1.60-ish to £1 per pat. By 'they', I mean Countrylife, Lurpak, Anchor etc. They seem to do it in rotation, as if by pre-agreement.
How can the price fluctuate so much? On the one hand, I feel bad for the farmers if I am under-paying but OTOH I think that I must be over-paying on the 'normal' price if they can afford to discount that much.
What's going on?

Thanks for the tip BTW. I got some Asda own-brand at £1/pat yesterday.

Tescos own was 93p the other day.

i got some yesterday. i'm wondering if they reduced it cos Tesco have a special on- 2 for £2- someone posted that deal a few days ago on MN.

I will go and get some and stick it in the freezer for Xmas!

Tesco are selling kerrygold at £1 at the moment

It has to be british though - not keen on this EC/Irish stuff (me british farming stock). And for baking I find better taste from the better brands however I do use the basic Sainbos usually £1.18. Have bought Adli in past.

I know a bit about how the supermarkets buy in but wonder how a supplier can afford to drop to such a margin unless they are also tied to dairies where the supermarkets can demand variations in price on demand. Agree that we are prob over paying when the milk producers are getting very very little.

Very little helps in boosting the profits of these supermarkets.

aren't they just loss leaders? i love danish and french butter, would buy more often if they were cheaper. I haven't compared them in baking, though logically french should be brilliant given how lovely french patisserie is over there!

Can you buy extra butter and freeze it? How long will it keep, and do you just defrost in the fridge?

How long does it last once defrosted?

if you wrap butter well it will keep in the freezer for 1 year for salted, around 3 months for unsalted. beyond these times it may start to deteriorate in flavour. Once defrosted? not sure but logically it will keep as long as it would have originally. So if you add a label saying when you froze it , then when you defrost see from the use by label how many days/weeks left you have using those 2 dates.
That might not be the official way of doing things but freezing arrests the process of food deteriorating so seems logical to me. Having said that i'd almost always use defrosted butter for a purpose i.e to make a cake next day or some buttercream so not something that i'd worry about.