Low US butter cold-storage stocks (2022)
May 2022: a documented market event that overlapped the wholesale price windows of 1 tracked ingredient — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
What happened
USDA data documented unusually low US butter cold-storage inventories through 2022. USDA NASS Cold Storage reported butter holdings running well below prior-year levels (a three-year seasonal low in May 2022, down about 23% year over year, with monthly holdings bottoming near 199.8 million pounds in November), while US milk production ran slightly under the prior year and USDA ERS data showed elevated butter/butterfat exports relative to 2021.
Documented account from our open, cited registry (sources below). Shown as context beside the price record — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
Affected ingredients
Why these ingredients were exposed
Each affected ingredient's public supply structure — where it comes from and how much it leans on imports. Context that makes the co-occurrence with a documented event legible, never its cause.
- Butter (AA, bulk)Domestically sourced comes almost entirely from domestic production, with little import buffer. Its exposure runs through domestic production structure, not import origins — a domestic event overlaps its price window.
It explains why an ingredient sits in the path of a documented event — not that the event caused any price move. Co-occurrence in time, never a cause.
The detected moves that overlapped
Each figure is a wholesale reference against its own ±26-week normal — a market move, never a delivered price.
No sustained wholesale move in our detected set falls inside this event's window. The event is documented; our public price series simply didn't flag a notable departure from normal for these ingredients then — an honest absence, not a hidden one.
What moved together
Co-occurrence, not cause
Butter
In Butter's 5 notable moves, these ingredients ran the same direction in the same weeks:
Moving in the same weeks is not one thing causing another — many of these share a growing region, a shipping lane, or an aisle. It is a directed, bounded count: in K of an ingredient's own notable moves, another ran the same way.
Sources
2 sources
- Butter: Cold Storage Stocks by Month and Year, US — USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
- Butter cold storage ending stocks and exports, January 2021 to August 2022 — USDA Economic Research Service
Documented events come from our open, cited registry (CC‑BY). Price moves are detected from public history (USDA/BLS/FRED) and shown as co-occurring context, never asserted as the cause. How events are picked.