12/26/06 Value added milk

If you think there's nothing new with milk or dairy, you had better think again. There is an amazing array of new milk products coming on the market and they are products that offer consumers additional benefits. Gail Barnes of Dairy Management Inc., which manages the National Dairy Checkoff, says innovation with value-added milk represents a valuable opportunity for dairy producers to move more milk. BARNES - "When we did a study looking for opportunities for innovation for value-added milk, we worked with a consultant to determine some estimates of how many pounds we were actually talking about in terms of opportunity. And the number we came up with was about 4 billion pounds." Dairy Management's Greg Miller highlights some of the new products that you could see from producer check off funded research. MILLER - "I think in the future we'll be seeing all sorts of milk and milk-based beverages. Vitamin added, Omega 3, all sorts of different things that give consumers different reasons to want to consume more dairy." The Dairy Checkoff is working to stimulate innovation by providing product research and other science to encourage food and beverage manufacturers to create new value-added fluid milk products That's good news to Idaho's growing dairy industry. Voice of Idaho Agriculture Bill Scott