From the Wall Street Journal:
"Americans’ thirst for cheap milk—and grocers’ rush to provide it—are remaking the centuries-old dairy industry.
"When supermarket shoppers reach for white gallon jugs these days, most of the time they grab a low-priced store brand. To expand those offerings, major grocery retailers, including Kroger Co., Walmart Inc. and Albertsons Cos ., have built their own milk-bottling plants.
"Grocers’ move into the bottling business is threatening some of the biggest operators in the $40 billion U.S. milk industry, the purveyors of national brands. Dean Foods Co., which until last year was the largest U.S. milk processor by sales, and Borden Dairy Co., another big producer, were sold this year after filing for bankruptcy in November and January. Executives of both had blamed some of their struggles on grocers’ focus on cheap milk, often used as a loss leader."
While milk sales have been declining for years, they've actually experienced a resurgence during the pandemic, the Journal writes, as "stay-at-home orders (and) pantry-stocking consumers this spring pushed up milk sales at retail for the first time in a decade."
- KC's View:
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More than a half-century ago, Stew Leonard's was a story that bottled its own milk … in fact, that always has been the core value proposition even as it has grown and expanded.
So this isn't exactly new.
More importantly, when my kids were little, they didn't like to drink milk from anywhere else, because they'd been persuaded that it was fresher when it was Stew's and tasted better.
This is a great example of finding things that can make you different, and working it in every possible way.
