Is bagged milk reaching its expiration date?
What you need to know about ‘apocalypse cow,’ according to experts
Worries about the death of bagged milk may have been greatly exaggerated, at least for now.
Sylvain Charlebois, director of the agri-food analytics lab at Dalhousie University, posted on X about bagged milk’s uncertain future in Canada.
“Don’t be surprised if you stop seeing bagged milk at the grocery store a few years from now … These are mostly sold in Ontario, Quebec and in the Atlantic Region,” Charlebois tweeted on Monday.
The comment sparked a slew of responses online from those holding out hope for the plasticwrapped variety of dairy, to those simply saying “good riddance.”
Bagged milk is a point of pride for the few eastern provinces that stock it on their grocery shelves, and often pointed to as a freakish, unnatural method of storing milk by anyone unfamiliar with the practice, even among Americans playing for Toronto sports teams.
But is bagged milk really on the decline? And how did we even get here?
Here’s everything you need to know about bagged milk.
The worry with bagged milk is the general decline in milk consumption, Michael von Massow, a professor at the University of Guelph’s Food, Agriculture and Resource Economics department explained.
“We know that per capita milk consumption is going down,” he said, even with a boost in overall milk consumption from Canada’s population growth.
Coupled with smaller households and a growing demand for dairy alternatives, Charlebois said, it could spell doom for bagged milk within the next decade.
“If someone can figure out a way to get teenagers to replace an empty bag of milk in the container,” Charlebois, a father of four, said, “I’m sure they’ll be more popular.”
And, if bags do disappear, von Massow added, it will most likely be due to technological advances that make jugs or cartons cheaper alternatives, it won’t be the end of the dairy industry as we know it.
“The form that it’s sold to us in may change,” von Massow said, “but if I was a dairy farmer, I wouldn’t be worried about apocalypse cow.”
It all started in 1967 with the American company DuPont, Mary Anne White said, describing the storied history of milk wrapped cozily in a polyethylene plastic.
White is a professor emerita of chemistry at Dalhousie University and researched the environmental impacts of bagged milk.
The plastic pouches of milk were developed around the same time as Canada was converting to the metric system, and the humble plastic bag was versatile enough to meet the change to litres, versus cartons and jugs which necessitated machine retooling.
Because milk producers, who decide packaging for milk, mainly differ province-by-province, White explained, Western milk producers never really caught on to the bagged milk trend.
Now, bagged milk is only really found in Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces.
But, Canada doesn’t have the bagged-milk monopoly — internationally, countries like India, Israel and some South American countries sell milk in bags too.
Germany even has a milk bag that can stand up on its own, eliminating the need for a milk jug to hold the plastic bag, White added.
On top of the novelty, White’s research found that bagged milk was the most environmentally friendly among different types of milkholding vessels.
After looking at the life cycles of plastic jugs, cartons and bags, White and her team of researchers found that bagged milk took the least amount of carbon and water to produce, even though they aren’t recyclable.
“The cartons take so much water, it takes 20 litres of water to produce a litre carton (of milk)” White said. Glass doesn’t fare much better for those hoping for longevity — it takes a large amount of energy to produce and can only survive an average eight uses before needing to be disposed.
We’ve yet to find the ultimate milk-carrying container so far, White said, but bagged milk is the closest we’ve gotten.
Banning single-use plastics that have a lower carbon footprint than their alternatives, like for milk bags, would be “even worse for the environment and also worse for the consumers.”