This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 9th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown. In Wisconsin, they have a curious way of grading butter and it's caused some problems for out of state producers that want to sell their products in the state.

Anastasia Bowden is an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation.

We spoke last week in Dallas.

Our client is Adam Mueller.

He is the owner of a family owned dairy in Minerva, Ohio. The company has been in business for about a hundred years

making ice cream, butter, various dairy products, cheese, and yeah he just wants to make some butter,

and it's really good butter.

It's artisanal butter, it's made in the Amish fashion.

It doesn't have the same taste and consistency as table butter and it's not meant to it's made from grass-fed pasture-raised cows and it's something more akin to carry gold than Land of Lakes.

Now you said this is really good butter.

Okay, I put that in, I wrote that down.

That is a matter of opinion. That's right. And yet in Wisconsin there are

human beings using their measurement devices that they have inside their mouths to determine whether or not

butter is acceptable to sell in Wisconsin.

So what is the nature of the...

The scientific process?

Well, what is the nature of the regulation in Wisconsin

that makes it so hard for out of state... of the

feature of the regulation in Wisconsin that makes it so hard for out-of-state producers of butter to sell it there.

Sure, in Wisconsin, you cannot sell butter unless it is first gone through a

government-mand mandated taste test and then is labeled with the government's grade.

So you have to get someone licensed by the state to come taste your butter each and every batch and of course for Adam that's extremely burdensome because he produces all of his better in small batches.

...