LATER this month, posters with the latest group of celebrities all with milky moustaches supporting the sale of milk will be unveiled and, not surprisingly, they will feature some of Team GB’s Olympic gold medal winners.
But farmers were yesterday warned that this will be the last round of promotion by the Make Mine Milk campaign and unless they help fund future campaigns, there is a danger that the 4.3 per cent increase in sales of milk achieved in the past three years will reverse.
Speaking yesterday, Sandy Wilkie, chairman of the Milk Marketing Forum, said he had doubts about the continuity of the scheme. One of the big dairy companies who had given the campaign financial support had already intimated they would not be continuing after the end of October.
The current £7.5 million campaign has also received approximately £2.5m from the European Union.
“The withdrawal of one major company makes it extremely unlikely the others will continue and they will revert to promoting their own brands,” he said. “We have now had three rounds of support for milk promotion from Europe in the past decade and it is unlikely that will happen again.”
His belief was the only way to guarantee a long-term strategy for promoting the milk industry would be if the majority of the money was collected at source. While he was aware this might not be popular with some producers, he said he was both heartened and surprised at the level of informal support such an idea had from those who milk cows for a living.
He recalled that, back in the time of the statutory Milk Marketing Boards, they paid a promotional levy to the Dairy Council, amounting to £26m annually and helping fund major promotional efforts such as Drinka Pinta Milka Day.
Now, an optimum promotional budget covering all dairy products and not just milk would cost £10m annually. If producers put up some of this money, Wilkie believed the processors would be far more likely to contribute.
Currently, producers have a levy of 0.06p per litre deducted from their milk cheques in order to pay for DairyCo, a statutory organisation coming under the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board.
In the meantime, Wilkie said he would be using the residue of the promotional cash in three main strands. The first would see a continuation of research into consumer attitudes as this would give early warning of any major changes in consumption trends.
In a reminder of how the Milk Race used to dominate the cycling scene in the UK and cottoning on to the increased profile of the sport in this country, there would also be some cash for promoting a major cycling event.
The third strand – which he was reluctant to expand on at this time – would link up with a major social campaign with milk being seen as a ideal non-commercial partner.
