Video: Ever struggled to spread hard butter on your bread? This knife will solve all your problems

A knife that makes it simple to apply hard butter to sliced bread might just be the best invention since, well, sliced bread.

Some would say it’s nothing but a minor inconvenience, but we all know that trying to spread butter that’s cold and hard and comes straight from the fridge (proper nice dairy butter in other words) onto a slice of bread is one of the greatest unsolved problems the world has ever known. Or at least the breakfast table has ever known. Millions upon millions of people have tried addressing the slab of butter repeatedly or even mildly heating it in an effort to solve their dining dilemma, only to watch in horror as their slice of bread is torn to pieces or else covered in large, barely digestible clumps of yellow scattered throughout. Thankfully, three friends from Sydney who go under the name DM Initiatives – Sacha Pantschenko, Norman Oliveria and Craig Andrews – have used their loaves to come up with a simple solution to an age-old problem, an ingenious knife which grates through the butter to create small strips that are easy to spread on a slice of bread. Known as ButterUp, or the Stupendous Splendiferous ButterUp to give it its full title, the knife contains 21 triangular holes that create strips of butter when it is applied to the larger butter block and contains a serrated edge on the other side so the knife can be used for its traditional cutting purposes. The knife has not yet gone on sale but the three lads have launched the product on Kickstarter in an effort to collect manufacturing costs in the region of €27,000, a figure that has been easily exceeded already thanks to support from well over 10,000 backers. The product will retail at approximately €7-10 when it does go on sale, but when it might be available in Ireland – where we imagine it will be very popular indeed – is as yet unclear. Will it be a success? All we can say is, in ButterUp we crust.