Release Date: September 2006
Word Version
A Distinction without a Difference
Jerry Kozak
President/CEO
For years, producers, processors and retailers alike have used milk’s many health and nutrition attributes to market dairy products. Remember “Nature’s most perfect food” and “Milk: It does a body good”? Even with more than a decade of “Got Milk?” behind us, those earlier marketing slogans still resonate with millions of faithful (albeit older) consumers. Even today’s “got milk?” and milk mustache advertising approach weaves in a healthy dose of health messages.
At the same time, however, today’s consumer marketing environment features a whole new set of claims about dairy products: “No harmful pesticides,” “from only grass-fed cows,” “no added hormones,” “no antibiotics,” “from family farms,” “sustainably produced” – the list is long, and growing (and don’t even get me started about raw milk – that’s a column for another month). Slogans like these can also be very confusing to many consumers, because haven’t we always assured people that milk is wholesome and healthy? And if certain products can make these unsettling claims, what does that then say about the milk my family has been drinking for years?
We’ve reached a turning point in the dairy market in the past few years. Part of it has to do with broader trends in food marketing, and the rise of new grocery chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joes, and the growth of the biggest of them all, Wal-Mart. Part of it also has to do with the development of organic food production regulations, and how marketers are using those rules as a way to differentiate their products. Another part of it has to do with the evolution of the ever-elusive consumer, and the types of products she purchases.
All rolled together, these trends mean that the entire dairy production, processing and marketing chain – from the farm to the fork – has to reexamine the image of dairy products. Because in many cases, the old assumptions about milk are being questioned like never before.
The most obvious example of all this is how organic marketers are touting their products by what they supposedly don’t contain. The National Organic Program guidelines, administered by the USDA, have established a strict set of criteria for how organic milk must be produced. The guidelines are valuable precisely because they are specific and stringent. What’s happened with the dairy products made from that organic milk, however, is sometimes unfortunate. Labeling and marketing claims like “no pesticides” and “no antibiotics” would lead the typical consumer to assume that conventional milk products – the Brand X that organic brands are competing with – might just contain disturbing levels of those unwanted chemicals. This, despite the fact that rigorous screening programs run by state and federal regulators help ensure that there are no worrisome quantities of pesticides and antibiotics in regular milk.
Then there’s hormones. There seem to be more claims all the time to the effect that conventional milk has added hormones, which must be a health concern. The fact is, of course, that our own bodies make hormones on a daily basis, and we’d be dead without them. We consume all kinds of hormones in the foods we eat, organic or otherwise; even strict vegetarians ingest hormone-laced plant foods. In fact, soy “milk,” another high-priced competitor with real milk, has far more bioactive hormones than cow’s milk.
Yet there is now a widespread impression that nature’s perfect food doesn’t do your body, or you kids’ bodies, much good, because of potential threats from unwanted scary substances. Somewhere along the way, at least in the minds of some consumers, the dairy halo has been tarnished. The question now is what can we do to set things right?
First, we shouldn’t hold our breath that federal regulators, especially the Food and Drug Administration, will do anything much about misleading labeling claims. Most of the common claims on organic labels are accurate (often they have asterisks and fine print so they pass legal muster), albeit not always fully truthful because of what they don’t say (i.e., that all milk is screened for antibiotics, just as all milk has hormones in it). Most dairy products in the grocery store could label themselves as being without added hormones and antibiotics. We in the industry have to do a better job of being watchdogs over what others are saying about the 95+% of dairy products sold that are not organic.
In addition to health claims, there are more statements today about the types of farms producing milk (usually the presumption is that big is bad and small is best). Some patrons of organic foods may assume that those products are locally produced by family farms. In many instances, that’s true – but not always. The biggest brand of organic milk is owned not by farmers but by a large corporation. In fact, most conventional milk is produced by local family farms, in ways that are more similar than not to organic producers.
As organic milk production increases and becomes more visible, hopefully more consumers will become better educated as to what the real distinctions are between conventional and organic production, and whether such distinctions represent a real difference. There are thousands of dairy farmers – the great majority – that are sustainable, family-run operations that service local markets with milk that is of higher quality today than a generation or two ago. We just need to tell that story better, and not assume people will continue giving us the benefit of the doubt. We’ve done well appealing to people’s bodies, now we need to educate their minds as well.
