PARIS-While planning a visit to the City of Light, Rachel Torres got an unusual request.

"My daughter wants French butter as a souvenir-really!" the Florida mall manager wrote in a Facebook group for Paris travel tips. Then, getting down to business, she asked: "How can I transport it on a nine-hour flight back to the USA?"

The answer, she'd find, involves insulated bags, cold packs, hotel-freezer favors and strategic packing. With Europe sweltering through summer heat waves, the window between culinary treasure and golden puddle has never been narrower.

Bars of artisanal butter have become an unlikely status souvenir, supplanting Ladurée macarons and drugstore skin care as the thing to bring home from one of the most visited cities in the world-despite the logistical challenges.

The obsession mostly centers on one address: La Grande Épicerie de Paris, the LVMH-owned luxury food hall attached to Le Bon Marché. Tourists treat a trip to the dairy aisle with the same reverence they might reserve for the Louvre.

Tightly stacked rows of paper-wrapped butter sit in a wall of refrigerators at the heart of the food hall. In the center is the crème de la crème: Maison Bordier, the small artisanal house in Brittany whose butters sell out the fastest.

Part of the appeal is the price. A 125-gram (4.4-ounce) block of its classic demi-sel sets shoppers back about EUR6 ($7). Exotic flavors such as yuzu and seaweed are slightly more, while black truffle is an extravagance at nearly EUR17.

The other part: Taste. French butter, with a higher fat content than most of its American counterparts, tends to have a creamier texture and a richer, more complex flavor.

"Truly melts in your mouth," Shawn Molko, a Toronto-based singer and content creator, said in a butter-tasting video that helped fuel the trend. "C'est magnifique!"

Molko decided to see what the Bordier hype was about during a trip to Paris last summer. He stowed four blocks in his checked luggage and slowly worked through them. "I was putting it in my eggs. I was putting it on my bread," he said. "I was eating like a king."

Foodies have long tucked culinary souvenirs into their suitcases to savor a taste of their trip long after they're home, but the 2024 Paris Olympics and social media have supercharged the trend.

La Grande Épicerie sold more than 700,000 blocks of butter in 2025-that's three bars every minute. Out of 200 offerings from 30 brands, the top seller was the 125-gram Bordier demi-sel.

"There's a completely irrational craze," said Julie Sugliani, head of product and communications at Maison Bordier.

Production has hit a ceiling, but the company has no intention of scaling up. "We don't wish to disrupt our work or compromise on quality," Sugliani said.

At La Grande Épicerie, the frenzy is wearing on regulars. "I don't want to spend hours in front of the fridge," one French shopper grumbled on a recent Sunday.

For tourists, the hard part comes when it's time to get their precious cargo home.

Pasteurized cream butter keeps at room temperature for a while thanks to its high fat content and low moisture, but that can be put to the test in hotel rooms where a minibar isn't always a given and on long flights.

Online tutorials suggest vacuum-sealing the butter (La Grande Épicerie offers the service for an extra euro), then freezing it overnight before tucking it in a suitcase between ice packs and clothes.

Torres came prepared. She brought an insulated bag and cold packs from home for the dozen blocks of butter she bought. She asked the hotel concierge to store the vacuum-sealed packs, picking them up before her flight.

All the effort was worth it-her daughter, a baker in her 30s, was thrilled with her souvenir, still slightly frozen.

Susan Lazar Mussaffi, a Miami-based chef, was fastidious about following the packing advice for her Bordier butter after braving La Grande Épicerie's Christmas crowds to get it. "I risked my life going in there."

She placed the frozen goods in her carry-on, thinking she was under the limit. Airport security thought otherwise. They confiscated all eight blocks. "I was so depressed," she said.

Charles de Gaulle airport, which follows European Union cabin-baggage rules, and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration both treat butter as a "spreadable"-frozen solid or not-though ultimately it's the security officers' call.

Checked luggage is a safer bet, with no liquid limits and most bags stowed in the cold hold, but it's no guarantee. One TikToker documented how her carefully packed blocks melted by arrival, the chili-flavored butter leaking onto the strawberry and raspberry. "Chili strawberry does not sound good," she wrote.

The final hurdle is customs, but it's not a high bar. Commercially pasteurized French butter is generally permitted up to five kilograms (11 pounds) for personal use.

New York influencer Christine Han bought eight Bordier blocks-along with a freezer bag and ice pack-after tasting the butter at a Parisian restaurant.

"I need to bring this back to America with me," she decided on the spot.

When she declared the butter at JFK, the customs agent glanced at her thawing bars and joked about keeping one-then waved her through.

The butter went back in the freezer. "I'm still able to enjoy it one year later."