Industry Pins Heavy Hopes on Light Milk
If nonfat milk reminds you of the blue coloring in a cheap set of watercolors, and if low-fat milk has too much fat for your diet, then the folks at the California Milk Advisory Board have a product for you: “Extra Light Milk.”
It has 1% butterfat, which puts it halfway between low-fat milk, with 2%, and skim with none. But the price is fatter than either. Retailing at about $1.25 for half a gallon, the new product is closer to the price of whole milk.
Not only is it better for you, board spokesman Adri Boudewyn maintains, but it offers what dairy folks call better “mouth-feel”--feeling more like milk and less like water as it crosses the tongue.
“So far, it looks like a winner,” Boudewyn says. “It’s a milk for the ‘90s.”
The milk advisory board hopes that it does better than a similar product introduced in the late 1980s. It, too, was a 1% butterfat product, but it was highly fortified with vitamins and minerals and was aimed at a very limited market: women concerned about calcium intake and osteoporosis. It was called, variously, Nice n’ Light from Knudsen, Lightlymaid from Jerseymaid and Slim ‘n Trim, from Slim ‘n Trim Inc.
“That product was minimal in sales and only available in Southern California,” said Gary Frank, another spokesman for the milk board. “It has 140 calories per serving as opposed to extra-light milk, which is 120.”
Extra-light milk took two years and $300,000 to create, and the dairy industry is backing its debut this month with a $3-million marketing budget through March. And so far, Boudewyn said, consumers don’t seem to be using it merely to replace other milk products, which had been an industry concern.
“In October and November we tested this milk in Orange County, in 12 Lucky Stores,” he said. “We wanted to make sure as an industry that this new milk did not cannibalize from other milks. What we found out after eight weeks was we had 6.5% of the market with this new milk.”
More important, he said, total milk consumption in the test stores went up 9.6%--an increase Boudewyn called “phenomenal.”
