Sales up 1.2% as consumers drink in milk campaign

Milky moustachioed adverts proclaiming the benefits of drinking milk appear to have hit the right tone with consumers, with sales rising by 1.2 per cent in the past year across the board and twice that increase in consumption being recorded among teenage girls.

Sandy Wilkie, the chairman of the Milk Marketing Forum, which is behind the countrywide campaign, said that two years ago milk sales were suffering a decline. However, following the introduction of Make Mine Milk – the nationwide generic promotion for nearly 20 years – a whole new generation of consumers had taken up drinking milk.

The £7.5 million funding for the three-year campaign will run out later this year, unless the consortium – which includes dairy giants Arla Foods UK, Dairy Crest, Robert Wiseman Dairies, First Milk and Milk Link – can be persuaded otherwise.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Any extension of the campaign would also require support from the European Commission, which has contributed one-third of the current cash.

Wilkie said that with the public turning to milk again it would be a big loss for everyone involved in the supply chain – farmers, processors and retailers – if funding could not be found to extend the campaign beyond the end of October.

In the short term, the campaign will step up a gear with nearly 500 dairy farmers throughout the country having signed up to help by allowing their fields and farm shops to be used to further raise the advertising profile.

This means that a whole host of new banners and posters showing Team Milk, the milk-moustached sporting quintet led by Olympic legend Denise Lewis, will be displayed across the country.

The campaign, which was targeted at a younger audience, also used teen idols such as Harry Potter star Rupert Grint, X Factor judge Kelly Rowland, reformed wild child Kelly Osbourne and Hollywood heart-throb Ryan Reynolds. The National Farmers’ Union’s dairy board chairman, Mansel Raymond, described the campaign as a big success as drinking milk was now seen by young people as a “cool” thing to do.

“There are challenging but exciting times ahead for the dairy industry and the ‘Make Mine Milk’ initiative has helped raise consumer awareness and changed attitudes towards milk.”

Other data emerging from the Kantar Family Food Panel, which isolates milk consumption among teenage girls aged 11-16, shows that there has been a 3 per cent increase in consumption overall between spring 2010 and summer 2011, the amount of milk drunk on its own among this group is up 3 per cent and the amount of milk consumed with breakfast is up 17 per cent.

The success of the Make Mine Milk moustache campaign follows that of the generic White Stuff milk promotion that ran in Scotland between 2003 and 2009.

By 31 December, 2009, the long-term decline in total fresh milk sales in Scotland had been reversed, with a significant increase of more than 3 per cent against the base year ending March 2003.