The museum is a unique institution. It tells the story of Ireland's most successful food industry, dairying, and Cork's greatest commercial enterprise, the Butter Exchange of the nineteenth century.

The visitor is introduced to the culture of cattle and dairying in Ireland from earliest times through the first upstairs gallery, which features a cask of early medieval bog butter, over a thousand years old.

A combination of maps, models, display panels and original documents and artefacts describe the history of this commercial phenomenon which, in its heyday, traded tens of millions of pounds of butter annually all over the world.

The traditional craft of home butter making is described in the downstairs gallery through a comprehensive collection of the objects used in the craft.The story is completed by a video documentary describing the revival of the dairy industry in the 1960's and 1970's through the formation of the Irish Dairy Board. Throughout the story, the visitor gets a picture of Ireland over the last fifty years, over which time the country has been transformed from a relatively poor country with low economic output to one of the most successful economies in Europe - a transformation in which the dairy industry played a significant part.