Emmy Keogh is buttering up her post-graduation plans
The graduating fourth-year communications major has used many of Penn’s resources for entrepreneurs to get her bespoke butter company churning.
2 min. read
Whenever the question of post-graduation plans came up, Class of 2026 communications major Emmy Keogh and her mom had a running joke: If nothing else pans out, she could always go home and open a butter shop in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.
Emmy Keogh is a Class of 2026 communications major and founder of bespoke butter company Debonair Butter Company.
(Image: Courtesy of Annenberg School for Communication)
“Charleston is full of cute artisanal storefronts: there's a honey shop and a creperie, and we thought it’d make sense to open a butter store,” Keogh says. “We’d joke that someone would be at the front of the store churning butter, and you could come in and make your own flavor.”
During the winter break of her fourth year, Keogh found herself making butter in her family’s kitchen. “I remember how proud I was of making my first batch of butter that was maybe the size of a small clementine,” she says. “The first flavor I made at my house was lavender orange zest, and I served it on bread to my family that night.”
The experiment led her to dream up Debonair Butter Company, a business that will make butter the centerpiece of any event: small-batch, flavored butter in all shapes and sizes.
“Making butter for the first time made me realize I needed to use Penn’s resources when I got back to campus, not just for guidance, but for actual tools and equipment, like cheesecloth and a food processor,” she says. She did some digging and found the Food Innovation Lab, part of the Penn Venture Lab, a partnership between the Wharton School, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Weitzman School of Design that helps Penn students develop entrepreneurial ideas, and decided to apply.
Keogh credits her communication major, data-focused concentration, and consumer psychology minor with giving her the foundational tools to build the pitch: lessons on how advertising shapes perception and how data tells a story. “It was exciting to ponder things like, ‘What is my value proposition? Who is my customer? And, how can I make butter a talking point around the table?’” she says.
She presented her plans for Debonair Butter to Lauren Hooks, the Food Innovation Lab’s senior associate director, and Hooks laid out some of the opportunities offered by the lab: pathways to Whole Foods, a potential week in a Michelin-starred restaurant, access to an FDA food analyzer, connections to local dairy farmers, and guidance on whether to sell within state lines or take the business national. “I was so overwhelmed by the possibilities, in the best way,” Keogh says. Since that meeting, Keogh has been in the Food Innovation Lab’s commercial kitchen every Wednesday and Friday, working out plans for her business.
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