Milk Promotion Dollars Well Spent

Larry Hancock
 

Muleshoe, Texas

A dairy pioneer on the Texas High Plains, Prairie View Dairy milks 4,200 Holsteins.

**Extended comments highlighted in blue.

Milk is about as natural and healthy a product as you can get at the grocery. Our job is to make sure we keep it that way in order to meet consumers’ and retailers’ demands.

We have discussed how we go about doing that in previous articles: keeping our bacteria counts down, keeping our cows as well as our facilities clean, and making sure our cows are in tip-top health and condition.

Once our milk has left the farm, we as dairy farmers have to depend on others to make sure the product and perception is also top-notch. I’ve had the opportunity to look behind the scenes a little to see where our monies have been spent. I like the job Dairy Management Inc. is doing for milk sales. Matching our promotion dollars with the dollars spent from other sources and companies allows us to receive more from each dollar that is taken out of our milk checks.

Partnering with Domino’s Pizza has been a positive way to promote the product. It revitalized their pizza market and increased the amount of cheese on each pizza along the way. We also had a hand in the increase of milk used at McDonald’s: in their kids’ meals, their gourmet coffees and keeping real cheese on the cheeseburgers. The Innovation Center and partnering with the NFL in "Fuel Up to Play 60" have both been very positive promotions that address the need for activity as well as calorie counting to maintain good health in children and adults.

Unfortunately, we have seen a decline in fluid milk sales, so we have to continue to find new ways to promote the product. We need to push for flavored milks to continue to be sold in our schools as we develop and promote products that will meet consumers’ needs through the different stages of their lives.

We all need to do our part to educate nondairy families about how great milk is so that everyone realizes milk is a natural, healthy and nutritious product that tastes great.