Cows and coffee campaign

I spend a great deal of time talking about cow’s-milk-free alternative milks (goat, sheep, nut, coconut, millet, quinoa……) – but I do realise that there are lots of food-sensitive people who are just fine with cow’s milk. It is other foods that present them with problems.

But, if people are going to drink cow’s milk, I do believe that they should drink ‘good’ cow’s milk. For some people that means ‘green top’ or raw cow’s milk. (Just ‘search’ raw milk in this blog and you’ll find half a dozen posts about it and if you want more, take a look on the FoodsMatter site.) For others it means A2 milk (you’ll find plenty on A2 milk on this blog and the FM site too…) For yet others it means organic milk. But for some people it just means milk from cows who spend their lives in the fields munching grass – not in some massive industrial barn eating soya pellets!

And for all of those people ‘Free Range Dairy‘ milk is what they need. I blogged about it last year but, in essence, it is a set of standards and a logo, Pasture Promise, created by Somerset farmer, Neil Darwen to be used  by farmers who have committed to grazing their cows outdoors, on grass, for at least six months of each year.

It costs farmers £50 to join the scheme and you can support it for as little as £2 per month. The Free Range Dairy milk costs roughly the same as organic milk – about twice what ‘standard’ milk costs.

When I first came across them last year they had just pulled off quite a coup as they had persuaded Asda to stock their milk 100 stores. Spooling through their site, it looks like more than 100 now. It is also stocked in Morrisons and  Booths.

And now their latest campaign is their Coffee and Cows Campaign. If you are going to worry about the provenance of your coffee and want to know that the beans have been grown sustainably and the farmers paid a fair price, why would you not also want to know about the milk added to that coffee to make your cappuccino or latte?

Do people care? Well, they commissioned a YouGov poll to find out and it told them that:

• 84% of respondents said that it was important for them to know that the milk came from farms where cows are assured high welfare.
• 84% also said it was important to them that coffee shops sourced their cows’ milk from suppliers who pay a fair price to dairy farmers in the UK.
• 64% of respondents said they would pay an extra 5p for a cup of coffee made with Pasture Promise free range milk; 10% were prepared to pay up to 30p more.

Do you care? If you do then you should be asking your local coffee shop to start buying Free Range Dairy milk!  And to help you do so, they have designed a leaflet that you can give them. You can download and print a copy here and you can read more about the need for the campaign and the background to it in their newsletter here.

I definitely think it would improve my cappuccino if I knew that the milk had come from a happy cow!