12/29/06 Value-added milk opportunities

Washington Ag December 29, 2006 If you think there's nothing new with milk, you had better think again. There is an amazing array of new milk products coming on the market. 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." Greg Miller, also of Dairy Management Inc., highlights some of the new products we could see from producer check off funded research. Miller: "I think in the future we'll see all sorts of milk and milk-based beverages. Vitamin added, Omega 3, all sorts of different things that give consumers different reasons 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. By the way milk is Washington state's number two commodity by value. I'm Bob Hoff.