I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!

Confirmed 55,448

About

I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! is a popular brand of margarine (a butter substitute) first introduced to retailers in 1981. Due to its worldwide marketing and high sales, many bootlegs of the product have been created, all of which are named with sentences similar to the original. In addition, many parodies of the brand packaging exist online, and offline, and the original packaging is often used as an exploitable.

Origin

The margarine brand was originally developed by the J.H. Filbert company in 1979, and was introduced to retail industries in 1981 in Washington, DC. The company was purchased by Unilever in 1986, which resulted in the brand being shipped and marketed in other countries. The marketing campaigns for the brand in the 1980s and 1990s were very notable, and are often a topic of nostalgia – they often featured people in melodramatic situations saying "I can't believe it's not butter!" Several memorable commercials featured the male model Fabio. As of 2005, I Can't Believe It's Not Butter is the best-selling butter-substitute in America.

Spread

As with other bootlegs, knockoff products of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter have gained a significant following online. Several blog articles have been made to showcase examples of these knockoffs on websites such as Serious Eats.^[1] Additionally, some examples have been posted to the r/crappyoffbrands subreddit,^[2] and the r/IsItButter subreddit was created on January 24, 2016, which is entirely dedicated to knockoffs of the margarine brand alone, however, it has only three subscribers.^[3]

Notable bootleg products worldwide

Aside from bootlegs, many parodies of the brand have been posted on sites such as 4chan and Tumblr. ^[4] The phrase is frequently used in video parodies and machinima videos; there are about 1,600 results for the phrase on YouTube.^[5]