Chocolate-covered strawberry? Birthday cake?
Limited-run milk flavors are helping Turner Dairy Farms to expand
Turner Dairy Farms may be well-known among Yinzers for its milk and iced tea, but the Penn Hills company has been adding new flavors to the dairy case: chocolate-covered strawberry; chocolate peanut butter; and coming this April for Turner’s 90th anniversary, birthday cake-flavored milk.
Flavored milks — more of a dessert than something to put on your cereal — have become a growth area for the dairy company, in an industry that in recent years has been hit by low milk prices and a shrinking market.
Turner Dairy is seeing enough growth in flavored milk, as well as whole milk and lactose-free milk, that it’s planning an expansion this year.
In January, the Penn Hills milk processor was awarded $334,282 in state funding to increase its facility’s dairy processing capacity. The funding, through the Pennsylvania Dairy Investment Program, will help toward installing a 20,000gallon silo to free up more processing capacity.
Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic is on everyone’s minds
these days, and Steve Turner, key account manager and marketing manager, said the company is working to keep up with demand at grocery stores and other retailers.
The plant is following guidance outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has not experienced any major disruptions, he said. While orders for retailers have jumped significantly, he said orders for schools are down as students remain at home.
For now, the expansion plans are going forward as planned.
“It may take some time for some of our suppliers, but we’re still tracking for this summer,” Mr. Turner said. “The most important thing right now is the healthy and safety of our team members and the community.”
Turner Dairy processes milk into skim, 1%, 2%, whole, half and half, and so on from about 40 small farms in the region. The facility, which employed about 205 people in March, processes about 40,000 gallons of milk per day. That’s in addition to other products like iced tea and lemonade.
“Pennsylvania tends to have smaller farms than the rest of the country, mostly because of our topography. We can’t have 10,000 cows like in the Midwest,” Mr. Turner said.
Overall, the dairy industry has been seeing its share of woe. For several years, the industry has been buffeted by low milk prices and shrinking markets. In November, Dean Foods, the nation’s largest milk processor, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, followed by Borden Dairy Co. in January.
Trying to stay afloat, many farms have become very efficient, producing more milk even as dairy alternatives such as almond, soy and oat are taking up more space in the refrigerator aisle.
Meanwhile, milk consumption has fallen. In 1975, Americans drank 247 pounds of milk a year. By 2018, that number had fallen to 146 pounds per person, according to data from the Department of Agriculture.
Mr. Turner said there’s “no doubt that fluid milk sales are declining, but there are pockets of growth.”
Those pockets are whole milk, flavored milk and lactose-free milk, he said. Whole milk, Mr. Turner said, is the only conventional white milk that’s growing.
One of the reasons, he said, is that consumers are looking for products that are minimally processed. Also, attitudes toward good fat and bad fat are changing.
“Butter used to be the enemy, but now butter, to a degree, is more acceptable than margarine or more processed alternatives.”
Over the past 10 years, Mr. Turner said the company has seen about 16% sales growth where the industry has seen that decline as a whole. Of that growth at Turner Dairy, about 79% has been the limited edition flavored milks and chocolate milk, he said.
Offering new flavors gives consumers a reason to go to the dairy case, he said. “The industry has a whole has done nothing to be interesting to consumers, to give them products that they’re looking for,” he said.
“If we just sell that we want to sell, consumers aren’t going to buy it. So we’re trying to sell what they’re looking for.”