DID Manor Farm (Dorset) resize their cartons of organic milk from pints to half-litres? I do remember seeing pint size cartons of their milk after the turn of the millennium and recently I see 500ml cartons on the shelf (correct me if I’m wrong).
I sent them an e-mail, asking them about what I believed to be a shrinkage, and they denied that their cartons of milk ever came in pint sizes. Their reply was as follows:
“Dear Mr. Rodriguez, Thank you for your letter about milk quantities.
Bulk milk sales off farms metricated many years ago, in the 1970s if my memory is right. When we launched our organic milk in 1992, it was a new product and we had to design and originate a new set of cartons. At that time nearly all milk retail packs were in multiples of a pint, but we took the view that this was set to change, so, to avoid having soon to alter all our cartons, and the cartoning machine, we opted for 500ml and 1 litre cartons. How wrong we were! 10 years on, although it is illegal to sell fruit and vegetables in non-metric weights, nearly all milk is still sold in multiples of the pint, with the exception of the 1 litre size which has become quite popular [not because people don’t know it’s not a quart?]. I do not know anybody else who uses the 500ml size! [well, these days they aren’t alone, talk about disaster. Plus, they are good at signing their own death warrant!] All the same, our customers seem very happy with it and you are the first person ever to have raised the issue with us [do most people even know that they’re 500ml cartons and not 568ml cartons? – even shops fail to spot sometimes – check the “250ml advertised as half-pint thread. After all, if consumers were vigilant then they would not even be getting ripped off three MILLION pounds per annum let alone the three billion that they’ve been getting conned annually for years]. As regards the price: milk prices in real terms have been falling for years and continue to do so: the actual price is the same as or lower than it was 10 years ago, which is the reason why most dairy farmers are operating at a loss at the moment and many are going out of business. When I was young a pint of milk, a pint of beer and a loaf of bread were all about the same price. Now a pint of beer is about 10 times as much as a pint of milk, and a loaf of bread about double.
So I do not think that anybody is being ripped off [No?], though with a variety of pack sizes being used for many different foodstuffs it is always wise to check the weight or volume stated on the pack before buying [most people don’t do that]. Some stores such as Waitrose do an interpretation on the shelf talker to make the price absolutely clear to the shopper.
Yours sincerely, Will Best.”
I’m sure I used to see pint sized cartons of milk – maybe they’re right, or maybe they’re covering up something. I would not know whether the price got reduced correspondingly with the shrinkage of the quantity – does anyone else who may have witnessed it? They may deserve praise in the eyes of the Soil Association for being so thoroughly organic (as do plenty of milk producers), but they do not in the eyes of us for reducing the quantity of milk.
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