Milk is Milk blog by Alex Avery
Recent developments in New England seem to have finally brought some attention to the practice of misleading labeling that has been rampant in the dairy industry for the past few years, most of it negative, but some of it is very positive. The country’s biggest milk processing cartel has announced that they are requesting that their suppliers - northeast dairy farmers - discontinue use of the productivity supplement rBST. This announcement has crystallized the debate for a lot of people. Three important points from the media coverage of this announcement:
- Dairy Farmers are the biggest losers here. While Dean under the brands of Hood and Garelick immediately upped the prices of their milk by as much as 30 cents a half gallon, dairy farmers (according to industry insiders) are being reimbursed a paltry five cents per hundred weight.
- Consumers lose big too. Dean is banking on the fact that consumers believe organic milk is safer and healthier for them AND that they are not willing to pay twice as much for it. So Dean’s plan is to fool them into buying “organic lite,” or as the Christian Science Monitor called it “kinda organic.”
- Organic producers are paying attention. Organic standards advocate Mark Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute is rumored to be concerned and watching for misleading labels. They are there, Mark. I’ll even help you find them.
To follow up on the Dean’s announcement, I had some friends in the northeast do a little grocery shopping for me last weekend. I asked them to look at the various products, their labeling and their prices. I also asked the shoppers, if they had the opportunity, to please ask the dairy case managers what was responsible for the increased prices, and the vast disparity in prices.
Surprisingly, most dairy case managers were not available to answer any questions. The one worker who was did not have any information about the products he was stocking, and went to the store manager’s office to report the shopper’s presence in the store. Now, I am not prone to conspiracy theories, but could it be that retailers are nervous about the precarious position that Dean’s has put them in? I mean, what if consumers started to hold retailers responsible for duping them into spending more of their grocery budget on a product that they believe is safer and healthier and in fact is neither? I’d be nervous because I think retailers are starting to suspect what we have known all along: Milk is milk.