I remember tasting milk of many cows in my family farm. Each cow had a “signature” taste and part of the experience of drinking milk was enjoying the different tastes. The taste of milk of one single cow depends on many factors: age, diet, health, etc. Then, how do companies standardise the taste of their bottled milk? Best case scenario I can imagine is that producers blends the milk of many cows, but this is definitely no guarantee of a standardised taste. How is this achieved?
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All the milk gets tested, brought to bottling and distribution, it gets combined into large vat of 1000s of cows, separated into milk fat and milk, then re mixed and tested to create skim 1% 2% and whole, or made into other products. So at one point you have skim milk and buttermilk, and then they will mix it back together to have accurate fat percentages.
Each cow has different fat content in milk, and mixing into a large batch and separating is the only way to ensure that the product that hits the shelves is a consistent product. Otherwise you are trying to balance percentages of each individual cow. Also the milk is easier to store in large vats to transport and bottle, so it isn’t going from teat to gallon jug, it goes teat to milk tank to processing to bottling to jug.
On Facebook there is Iowa Dairy Farmer who does a lot of great explanations of the dairy process.
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