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Unusual Packaging: Milk Sold in Pouches Saves the Day for Wisconsin Schools
Weber's Farm Store has sold milk by the bag since 1973
First established in 1946, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's National School Lunch Program provides funding assistance for "nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to children each school day." Below is what the kids are meant to consume:
Ironically, dairy-rich Wisconsin is having a problem supplying the milk. Not for want of cows; the region is suffering from a packaging shortage of the half-pint containers schools require. (Dairy producer Borden-Select recently shuttered bottling plants in Illinois and Wisconsin, ending supply.) And if the schools don't provide kids with the milk, their funding from the program gets cut. This has led to a situation where "Supplies of small cartons of milk had to come from as far away as Minnesota or Iowa or even further," the Wisconsin State Farmer newspaper reports.
A local operation has come to the rescue. For reasons unknown (I assume cost), central Wisconsin's Weber's Farm Store has rather bizarrely been packaging their milk in plastic pouches since 1973.
Each gallon bag actually contains two half-gallon pouches, which you can kind of make out in the photo below.
When the business learned of the shortage, they had their bottling operation start filling 8-oz pouches to supply the schools. It's worked out for both parties: Weber's has gotten a sales boost, supplying schools totaling nearly 10,000 kids across three counties in central Wisconsin. And "The school districts love it," Ken Heiman, whose family owns the bottling plant, told WSF, "because it cuts their garbage* by 80 percent and the price is less."
As for the UX of drinking from a pouch, Heiman says the schoolkids "stick the straw in the pouch… It's like a juice box." I wonder what the folks who buy gallon pouches do; I assume they decant it into a sturdier vessel at home. I wonder if folks in other parts of the country would be willing to do the same since they'd be paying less for the milk. If so, that could start a packaging revolution.
Which would be worse for the environment, unrecycled milk cartons or unrecycled plastic pouches? *(You'll notice Heiman said "garbage" in his quote above. Milk cartons are technically recyclable…like a lot of other things that don't get recycled. I'm guessing central Wisconsin's recycling facility, like many across the country, are not equipped to recycle milk cartons.)
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Bagged milk has been a thing in Canada since 1967, and it's still going strong in places like Ontario:) It's an eco-friendly way of buying milk. You can find a 4-liter milk bag in stores, which contains three separate 1.33-liter bags. This style of packaging is known for using less plastic per liter of milk. Yes, On occasion they do leak:(
Bagged milk is the norm in Israel, or at least it was last time I was there. It's common around the world. In fact, there's a wikipedia page listing all the countries that use it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_bag
These things were popular around here in the late 1970s. They were a fad for a while, but they took the experience of serving milk from being casual and unconscious to being something which was fraught with peril and required constant vigilance. The small plastic jugs held one bag which usually didn't last for a whole meal. Also they always felt as though the bag would fall out when it was poured, which was unnerving. When they were down to the last quarter they sometimes did. You had to have a pair of scissors to open them, and if you wanted to decant them into a larger and more stable container you were wrestling with four separate bags which changed their handling characteristics the second you cut off a corner, which meant you only had one hand to support a bag that, if it was held tightly enough to give a good grip, would overflow and spill milk. Even with two hands they were unpleasant to pick up and pour from. Nobody liked them and they were discontinued after a few months.
I don't think this is a lot more eco-friendly than a gallon of milk in a very thin plastic container. It's not at all good design.
As the article stated, we've had bagged milk in Wisconsin for decades. Kwik Trip convenience stores have sold it this way for as long as I can remember. I always thought the reusable pitcher was eco-friendly ahead of it's time.
I had bag milk all through high school in New Hampshire in the 90s. Never knew it wasn't the norm until I moved later.
We had the 8oz pouches in elementary school in NY. I never knew if that was just a weird local thing or not. Great fun until you poked the straw through both sides of the bag and then were in trouble.