PR for Dairy

I visited Nexus on Tuesday lunchtime, Nexus are the company currently employed by DairyCo to conduct consumer research and manage the current campiagn designed to inform consumers about how milk is produced on farm. There is a website www.thisisdairyfarming.co.uk which is designed to inform and defend dairy farming. some interesting new Moovies (lol) are going live this week which show different diary systems in action.
Amanda Ball was also there and we had a very tasty lunch (Amanda liked mine so much she ate some of it!!) We discussed current trends and it is clear that farmers have a long way to go to inform the general public about how they produce milk, and given what I learnt at Dairy Crest yesterday the sooner we start the better.
Nexus also work with the egg industry and there are some interesting and rather confusing messages from what has happened in the egg market which could be lessons for the dairy industry.
Here are some observations about eggs.
* Eggs are sold by the way they are produced e.g caged, barn, free range and organic
*Eggs are labelled by method of production, farm they were produced on and country of origin across europe
* UK eggs are also labelled with a Lion Brand which is a bit like Assured Dairy farms but stricter and this also has a best before date
*Nearly 50% of the retail egg market is free range and this is growing by 10% per year
*Caged egg market is shrinking- but this may be arrested by the introduction of enriched cages
Eggs are in the same "basket" at a supermarket, and are seen by the consumer as something similar.
When I was at Dairy Crest the other day we discussed briefly "local Choice" milk which was a brand of milk sold in supermarkets for a premium because it was sourced locally. It failed because consumers believed their milk was local anyways not because they didn't like local milk.

Look, milk is produced in fields!

If consumers also believe that milk is produced in fields of grass then how confused will they be when they find out it is not necessarily so.
Here are a few milk facts
* 80% of milk is produced with grass in the cows diet (Free range?)
* Tankers collect mik from farms with dedicated supermarket supplies (Dairy Crest do this for M&S and Waitrose- Arla and Wiseman for the others)
* All Dairy Farms are audited by Assured Dairy Farms
The above facts could be used to go some way to labelling milk in the way that eggs are to reassure the public of its origins and give them choice about which milk to buy.
This way no producer should be ashamed of the way they produce milk or feel disadvantaged by any other production method, if the farmer chooses to produce milk in a certain way he can be assured that the buying public know what he does.
I am off to World Society for the Protection of Animals tomorrow, I am going with a little bit of trepidation........