Dairy: DFO clashes with the Dairy Council over 'milk beverage' labeling

Monday, August 9, 2010

The Ontario Dairy Council, representing processors, wants to add modified milk ingredients, but Dairy Farmers of Ontario opposes this, saying that it will create consumer confusion

by DON STONEMAN

The Ontario Dairy Council wants its processor members to be able to sell "milk" beverages containing modified milk ingredients to consumers.

"We are asking to be allowed to put other ingredients into a milk beverage to allow processors to be innovative and to increase the market," says Christina Lewis, vice-president, Ontario Dairy Council.

Currently, "milk beverages" are allowed to contain only flavouring in addition to milk itself. Products with modified milk ingredients in them are labelled as a "dairy beverage." The dairy council has sent a proposal to the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission asking for this change.

Dairy Farmers of Ontario opposes the proposed labelling change and finds the way that some companies are currently marketing dairy beverages troubling.

General manager Peter Gould and some farmers already see problems with some brands of one and two litre cartons of chocolate-flavoured dairy beverage. The bigger containers that farmers find offensive resemble the half and quarter litre single-serving cartons of chocolate "milk," which don't contain modified milk ingredients and are labelled as a "milk" beverage. They think consumers will be hard pressed to tell the difference on the shelf.

"I think the consumer is being deceived by this," says John Miller, a member of the Simcoe County Dairy Producer Committee. Miller describes the chocolate drink as "an inferior product" compared to chocolate milk.

Modified milk ingredients might be whey protein concentrates or whey permeates, a whey product where protein is removed, Gould says. Or it might include other products derived from milk processing.

Regardless, you are altering the nutritional makeup of the product, Gould argues. "You have no idea what the modified milk ingredient is. Nor do you have an idea of the proportions."

Some companies have already been made to draw back on this labelling issue, Gould says. Before being warned by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which enforces provincial regulations on labelling, processors were marking chocolate drinks with modified milk ingredients in them as milk beverages.

"What they had been doing illegally they want to be able to do legally," Gould says. "It's about business ethics as far as I am concerned."

He shares Miller's concerns about the current positioning of chocolate milk and chocolate dairy products in supermarket shelves. "The package remains identical," he says. The packages may be side by side in a retail dairy case and consumers picking up a carton of chocolate dairy drink would not know they aren't getting milk. He agrees it is difficult to read the list of ingredients on the side of a package of chocolate dairy beverage.

Gould says Dairy Farmers of Canada, the national lobby and promotional body for milk producers, is doing some research to determine if consumers understand the difference.

All the companies are putting milk in individual or single-serve packages, Gould says.

"Part of the reason is . . . they had replaced milk for a time with dairy drinks and the schools reacted to that," Gould says.

Gould says DFO has raised a number of concerns related to labeling but doesn't know when the Farm Products Marketing Commission will deal with them. Chairman Geri Kamenz says he agrees that clarity and truth in labelling are important. The Commission will be working with producers and processors "to find a solution that does not put the Ontario industry at a disadvantage to competing interests such as Quebec."

Miller points out Ontario producers have already been squeezed out of the ice cream market. Most companies have quietly converted from making ice cream to selling "frozen desserts" with little or no change to the outside packaging. BF