Success In The Marketplace: The Dairy Checkoff & Land O'Lakes

Just like your co-op, the farmer-funded dairy checkoff is in the business of selling and promoting consumption of your milk. No longer known for generic advertising and short-term retail promotions, today’s checkoff works with and through co-ops, brands, partners and the industry, including Land O’Lakes, to find a home, here and around the world, for increasing milk production. Here’s how:

• The checkoff worked with pizza companies and suppliers on product reinvention and marketing to create a dramatic turnaround in pizza and the amount of cheese sold through pizza. We have taken a category that represents 25 percent of all cheese sales and was on a steep, multiple-year decline, and turned it around to generate 24 straight months of unparalleled growth – using an additional 2 billion pounds of milk per year in this effort. One outgrowth of that was the conversion of cheese purchases by the big three pizza chains for their Pacific Rim/Asia outlets from foreign to U.S. sources, resulting in 60 million new pounds of cheese sourced here at home this year.

• Today, dairy-based specialty beverage options such as coffee-flavored dairy drinks, smoothies and many other products at fast food restaurants are growing. We started that change with McDonald’s, and others followed.

To read the rest of the story, please go to: Land O'Lakes Growing Together Magazine