chinese visa people), today I visited the very nice people at Dairy Crest
in Esher.
They have an interesting position in the market and maybe have to think with
two brains as they deal on one side with farmers who supply them quality
milk and on the other supermarkets who are their customers. I think
they do a very good job of this balancing act.
What they do was summed up very concisely in this statement "We take
quality milk and add value to it" which I thought was a perfect
description of what they do.
It was interesting to see that they find different concerns at these two poles
of their business, but both ends are price sensitive and both ends have different views of what milk production is like. .
As you will see in my last blog, I am not sure that consumers care about
where their milk comes from initially, but when pressed show concern for animal
welfare and think that milk production involves fields and grass.
This is the view of Dairy Crest too, in fact they may go further to say that when pressed
consumers have a much more romantic view of milk production involving flat
caps and farmers with walking sticks, so me being me says, does
this mean that if there are units producing milk in a more intensive way across
the country, then this must mean the consumer is in denial- No, the
reply, they are blissfully unaware which is different; If they were in
denial they would know about how milk is produced but put it to the back of
their minds.
Now then, this might be a good thing, in a "what they don't know won’t
hurt them" kind of way, but is it a good long term plan for our industry
to perpetuate a romantic myth about milk production, and it also implies that
farmers are ashamed of how they produce milk- which i for one am not.
On wednesday I am meeting with "the other side".
World Society for Protection of Animals recently held a stunt in London and run
a Not in My Cuppa Campaign about large scale or "battery" production of milk.
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