A Day in the Life of a Bottle of Milk

If you were asked to think of a product that is natural, wholesome and above all fresh, chances are milk would come fairly high on your list. For centuries, milk has been a staple part of diets worldwide and, despite the alternative milk substitutes jostling for their position in the marketplace, the demand for cows’ milk is still growing. But that increased demand comes at a price. The distance that milk is transported has also grown so, how fresh is your fresh milk?

Here at Oak Park Dairy we consider ourselves to be very lucky. We have the ability to produce, bottle and deliver the milk produced right here on the farm to you, our customer, within a few hours of the cows being milked. We have ultimate control. But other farmers have to rely on supplying larger retailers as their only route to getting their milk to the consumer. We are always given the impression from supermarkets that the milk on their shelves is fresh so let’s track the journey of a bottle of our milk compared to that of supermarkets.

Imagine the scene: It’s 6pm on a Sunday evening and Emily is busying away in the milking parlour singing along to the radio and chatting to her beloved ‘girls’ as they are being milked. The milk is then pumped in to the chilled bulk tank for a few hours and at 1am, Matt rocks up to the dairy to start pasteurising and bottling 1000 bottles of milk and cream. He emerges unscathed and ready to put in a days’ work on the farm, at 10am. So far, that’s 16 hours from the time the cows have been milked to the point where it is in the bottle and it has probably travelled about 20 metres in the process of getting from cow to glass. At this point on a regular dairy farm, the supermarket milk is still waiting to be collected. In fact, it is now common practice for collections to be made every 2 days so some of the milk will already be 48hrs old before it even leaves the farm. Let’s get back to the action. It’s midnight (yes you heard right!) on Tuesday, the day of delivery, and Matt, Eric & Annette are about to roll out of the yard, vans loaded and ready to swiftly dispatch their clinking cargo to you, our lovely customers. In the meantime, the supermarket milk has finally been collected and is on its way to a local depot. But it doesn’t stay there. It’s now got to travel 100’s of miles across country to one of the enormous processing plants where it will be standardised, pasteurised, homogenised and bottled.

But it’s still not the end of the road just yet for the supermarket milk.

Meanwhile, in sleepy East Devon it’s 7am and you’re waking from your golden slumber to the sound of glorious birdsong and a whistling kettle and you think “milk!” You open the front door and there it is, your welcoming bottle of Oak Park Dairy milk, glistening in the early morning light. But spare a thought for that poor bottle of supermarket milk. It is still on the road. It’s now got to hop back on to another lorry and travel back across country to a centralised distribution hub, then on to a supermarket depot before it finally hits the supermarket shelf where it will wait longingly, possibly for another day, before a customer plucks it off the shelf. It will be at least 5 days old before it even gets a sniff of a cup of tea or coffee. By the time the lid is finally opened on the supermarket milk, Emily, Matt, Eric & Annette will have already milked and bottled a fresh batch and completed their Friday deliveries and you will be waking up to another day and another cheery hello from that fresh bottle of milk on your doorstep.

That’s the beauty of buying local.