Posted on 11/12/2019 10:18:52 AM PST by Red Badger
Dean Foods, America's biggest milk processor, filed for bankruptcy Tuesday amid a steep, decades-long drop-off in U.S. milk consumption blamed on soda, juices and, more recently, nondairy substitutes.
The Dallas company said it may sell itself to the Dairy Farmers of America, a marketing cooperative owned by thousands of farmers.
"Despite our best efforts to make our business more agile and cost-efficient, we continue to be impacted by a challenging operating environment marked by continuing declines in consumer milk consumption," CEO Eric Berigause said in a statement.
Since 1975, the amount of milk consumed per capita in America has tumbled more than 40%, a slide attributed to a number of reasons but mostly the rise of so many other choices, including teas, sodas, juices and almond and soy milk.
(Excerpt) Read more at weartv.com ...
Milk was always a loss leader before. Women shopped at the place where milk was the cheapest even if other items cost more. Now, because family size is smaller, and the prevalence of dairy allergies, women don’t buy as much milk. So they don’t care as much about milk prices. So stores are letting the price of milk go back where it belongs. Milk is cheap. You get 16 1/2 pint glasses or cereal bowls in every gallon. If its $3 a gallon, you are paying under 19 cents a glass.
The reality is that milk shipping and refrigeration is costly. Milk is very heavy. And it requires dark cool shipping at every stage of delivery. Unlike sodas that can sit on a normal truck and be stacked on a regular store shelf, milk goes bad with just a little bit of sunlight.
They call it “milk” because no one in marketing wanted to sell nut juice.
>>>They need to bring back the “Milk: It does a body good!” commercials from the 70’s................
Those were part of the milk check off program, which was funded by a defined amount deducted, currently $0.15 for every cet of milk produced commercially in the US, from the farmers’ checks.
I haven't had a glass of milk after I moved out of my parents house over 40 years ago. I still enjoy the occasional ice cream treat.
Commodity, component, and class. If you want to be one of the five people who understand how milk pricing works, you can read about FMMOs here:
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/how-milk-is-priced-in-federal-milk-marketing-orders-a-primer
Dean used to make that too. What killed Dean is that they brought in a bunch of people to run the company who knew how to run a mega-corp but not a conglomerate.
A mega-corp has a bunch of locations that churn out the exact same stuff and they are all run exactly the same way. A conglomerate is a bunch of formerly independent companies that while they run in unison they tailor their product to local tastes. You mess with local flavors and favorites at your own detriment. And that was exactly what they did.
They also tried to certralize (badly) things that should have stayed local.
$1.49 a gallon at Walmart near me
I buy Deans at a local grocery, myself
15 years or so ago I traveled NC Hwy 62 in a section that was nothing but former dairies. It was the bread and butter of farming in that section of the state for over 100 years.
It was ghost town that was miles long with one abandoned dairy after another. A sad sight of old barns, silos, feed pens that provided jobs, built families and put a lot of kids through college back in the day.
I was gonna say. Gasoline is cheaper than milk. I drank plenty of milk through my twenties. I drink _maybe_ a quart a month now. But even if I put away a gallon of milk a week, it would be tiny fraction against what I spend on gas.
price controls.
How in the world are milk prices so cheap up north and so expensive here? $3.65-$3.80 per gallon?.......................
Dean, you make one of those items except the soda. You also produced bottled water.
Pull the other one, it has bells on it.
“Since 1975, the amount of milk consumed per capita in America has tumbled more than 40%”
Sorry, my fault. That was the year I was diagnosed with lactose intolerance.
We pay almost 4.00 for a half gallon of whole milk - gladly. It is the A2 brand, natural milk with no additives, it is just devoid of the A1 protein that is a mutation that many dairy cows carry. We used to drink only our own goats milk for 25 years. Goats milk, sheeps milk other mammal milk is all A2 protein. Many people who think they are lactose intolerant are actually reacting to the A1 protein. These are all facts. There are research studies out there. On a lighter milk related note, this youtube on almond milk is hilarioushttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJCTIPWPNtw
Here, Gasoline is $2.34, milk is $3.65..........................
Whole milk is $1.59 @ gallon at Wegman’s ....all day, everyday.
Same here, except here it’s citrus groves.
All that Globull Warming has made it nearly impossible to grow citrus where they used to be abundant.............
Probably since that’s where the most dairy farms are.
Several mega-dairy farms within an hour of me
>>>How in the world are milk prices so cheap up north and so expensive here? $3.65-$3.80 per gallon?.....
There are not a lot of dairy farms in Alabama, so the milk has to be transported in. It’s not cheap to move a bulky product that requires refrigeration.
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