MILKING THE SYSTEM - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 133

Pomeroy, Ohio, located in the southeastern part of the state. His milk is the freshest that is available on the
grocery store shelf—minimally pasteurized and not homogenized. As an engineer with years of experience
in the dairy industry, he was able to design and build a state-of-the-art creamery. The milk exceeds FDA
pasteurization standards and often makes it to the store shelf in a day. The dairy broke ground in 2006 on
Bill Dix and Stacy Hall's three-hundred-acre dairy farm, where 130 cows eat very little grain, spend most
of their time outside, and are grazed rotationally on a mostly grass diet.
Taylor says that over his thirty years of association with the industry “it has become so consolidated
that it's dominated by two giants: DFA and Dean Foods.” He laments that even organic milk is not a real
alternative, because in most cases, the cows are milked on factory farms, and Dean Foods now owns one
of the largest organic brands, Horizon.
Taylor's assessment of the industry is correct. Dean Foods is the largest dairy company in the country,
at the top of the Dairy 100, which ranks companies by sales of dairy products and also lists companies
engaged in any aspect of the dairy industry. DFA, ranked eleventh in size, is also the primary—and in
some regions the exclusive—supplier of milk to Dean Foods. 22 In turn, Dean Foods processes and markets
around 40 percent of the nation's fluid milk supply, 23 60 percent of all organic milk, 24 and 90 percent of
soy milk. 25
Dean Foods began buying strong regional milk brands in the 1980s: between 1987 and 1998, Dean
bought fourteen fluid milk companies. 26 Dean Foods also merged with Suiza Foods, which was a merger
of two of the largest fluid milk processors. Dean Foods is the most common source of milk in the dairy
case, but consumers rarely see a Dean label. Dean or one of its subsidiaries owns or sells more than fifty
brands, including Alta Dena Dairy, Berkeley Farms, Borden, Country Fresh, Garelick Farms, Horizon Or-
ganic, Land O'Lakes, Lehigh Valley, Mayfield Farm, Meadow Brook, Meadow Gold, Reiter, Shenandoah's
Pride, Silk Soymilk, Swiss Dairy, Verifine, and several dozen others.
Ranking the size of dairy industry players is confusing, both because the industry is global and because
there are so many steps in the chain of production from the milk to manufacturing products such as
cheese, butter, ice cream, and other foods. Because dairy companies can engage in many aspects of
the industry, from processing milk to manufacturing products, it can be difficult to rank companies by
product—so instead, this is done by gross earnings. Dean ranks first in terms of size, Nestlé is second,
Saputo (headquartered in Quebec) is third, Kraft is fourth, and Land O' Lakes is fifth. Many of the dairy
companies have business alliances that are not obvious to the consumers who buy the products.