Chunky Milk Problem
Bad news for Tom and Gerry and the NL dairy farmers
Dairy Farmers in Newfoundland and Labrador have a very big problem.
The overwhelming majority of the 23 working dairy farms in Newfoundland and Labrador formed a co-operative last year and, with the government’s financial backing, bought out the provincial operations and brand of Central Dairies back in the spring this year.
Around the time of the fire.
The milk’s off.
Since the fire and maybe for for a while before. There’s sub-reddits going back four years with people complaining of sour Central Dairies brand milk. Buy a carton and it will be sour within a few hours of opening it regardless of the date on the gable peak. Not just once. A chronic problem. Many of us know this from first hand experience, although the company’s been quiet about the issue.
Here’s an example of one social media comment from this year:
This has happened a few times now. When we buy central dairies. On the bottle [sic] it will say best by: may 30th, but I goes bad about 5-6 days before. It starts to taste really bad and it's get chunky. The milk isn't spending long in our fridge because we like to drink milk so it's usually gone in 1-2 days.
We've also bought it closer to expiration and it's chunky straight from the store so I don't think it's a problem with our fridge.
I'm think it could be a problem with our store in Bonavista, but I'm asking here to see if it could be a problem with the milk itself.
That big chunky problem got a lot bigger and way chunkier this week.
Now there’s stuff in the milk.
Leaves black stains around the inside of the carton.
For some reason the former owner Agropur - not the NL Dairy Co-op - did all the talking Friday about the recall of Central Dairies milk, which the company reps said was the result of a “food spoilage organism” and was not in any way a food safety issue. Just a quality problem. Plant manager Jerome Whelan said the company “sincerely apologises” for the inconvenience to consumers and in a Zoom interview, Agropur’s Quebec-based communications director mouthed the same corporate line for local media.
From a public relations perspective - that is, persuasion and relationships versus “communications” - that’s about as helpful as taking John Hogan (check the bit at about 11:00 minutes) out of a relatively mild portfolio where he shat the bed messily in public with some thoughtless comments, then rolled around in it a bit, and putting him in health where he got a simple question Friday and looked, sounded, and acted combative and cranky rather than simply offer the evidence to back his claims that all is well in health care.
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This is a Class 3 recall for the local milk, which from the federal government’s standpoint means there’s little risk that “consuming the food may result in any undesirable health problems.” Well, for most of us heaving up our stomachs into the toilet is an undesirable health problem but, no, you are not likely to die from the heaves you’d get from chugging sour milk.
But as soon as the plant manager and the rest of the Agropur bunch said the words “not a food safety issue” anybody who didn’t already think it was a food safety issue understood this is most definitely not just a minor inconvenience of “food quality.” Wilted lettuce or soggy fries or an overcooked steak counted as poor food quality. Calling Beulah and Ralph on the round white telephone? Food safety.
The denial triggered people’s instinctive understanding of The Rule of Opposites. If they say it’s not that, it’s that. Right away all the folks who have been turned off buying Central Dairies milk are not going back. If they haven’t stopped buying Central Dairies milk, they likely will now. There are choices and people will make them. Price is not an issue.
This was a crisis months ago. It’s a crisis not just because someone like me says so. It’s a crisis because the company’s relationships are at risk. Its reputation is under attack. And along with that could go the company profits, its survival as a successful business, and all the jobs that go with that, and by extension the survival of local dairy farmers and their employees.
This is a very big deal. Certainly way bigger than folks are making it out.
And it’s not just a public relations problem.
It’s a very big management problem, which is what all these things are. Breast cancer. Muskrat Falls. Every government from Dunderdale to Furey and their problems with the polls and voters.
100% management failures.
First failure: not realising they are in a crisis, even if it is in the early stages before it explodes.
Second failure: not identifying the problem and fixing it. Calling it a communications problem is just a version of this failure since it is never about “communications.”
Third failure: not telling people affected - workers, clients or customers, and so on - the organization has a problem and explaining what the problem is in simple words, spelling out to them in simple words whatever the solution the organization will try, and then actually doing it.
Everything else is denial and denial equals death. Sometimes literally death like breast cancer. Sometimes just figurative death like people losing jobs or a company losing money.
The gold standard for handling something like this is Maple Leaf Foods and listeria. With a major food poisoning outbreak that claimed 22 lives, senior leaders at Maple Leaf foods ignored the usual legal and other managers’ advice to deny, dodge, duck, dip, and deny.
They did exactly the opposite.
Lawyers and marketers will claim all sorts of credit for the success in hindsight for their patch, but the truth is Maple Leaf Foods survived because they *didn’t* listen to the advice from the B school grads and the JDs and the defensive instincts that normally cut in for the managers inside the organization. The leaders got good public relations advice and they took it because they are leaders. They looked after their reputation and relationships and lived up to clear values.
For the local milk crowd, this festering problem is not going to disappear and the company’s recall is not going to fix the deeper issues. Central Dairies has clearly been struggling with issues for months if not years and trying to claim credit for this voluntary recall is a bit like the gang at the old health authority who tried to tell Justice Margaret Cameron they deserved an atta girl because they answered media questions about the tragedy in its early days.
Horse crap. If they’d done something *before* being asked, then they deserved credit. Sort of vaguely describing a problem and then giving yourself praise is just masturbation and doing it in public is not just unpleasant, you should get arrested for it.
In the case of the dairy bunch in Newfoundland and Labrador, they really are shoveling cow manure. They’ve got a big problem. They are not fixing it. And you can tell they are not following the right playbook because they use anything but plain English to explain things. This crisis goes in on top of generally declining milk sales, the limited shelf space Central Dairies has in stores compared to competitors, and the fact most people in Newfoundland and Labrador don’t know we have a dairy industry in the province let alone one that could be growing and doing a lot better. They don’t know and they couldn’t care less about it, despite that one-off ad campaign.
This could also become a real political issue for Tom and Gerry, the newly formed political tag-team responsible for the province’s dairy industry. Tom Osborne left the health ministry to be general manager of the milk marketing board, these days doing business under the name Dairy Farmers of Newfoundland and Labrador. Gerry Byrne is the newly appointed minister of agriculture. DFNL reports to him.
DFNL is not the association that represents the dairy industry. It’s the milk industry regulator according to provincial law. They’ve got a role to play in this mess and someone needs to ask them what they are doing. Hold them to account.
Under the provincial government’s Milk Scheme, DFNL exists to “promote, regulate and control the production and marketing of milk in the province by producers, processors, distributors, retailers, dairy operators and HRI tradespersons.” That last one is all the people who are “engaged in buying milk for the purposes of resale to the public through a food services premises.”
DFNL doesn’t just limit who can be a dairy farmer under the Canadian system of supply management. Under the Milk Scheme, DFNL can set “quality standards and practices in relation to milk… impose penalties [for not meeting the standards]… [and] prescribe the terms and conditions under which penalties…are payable, the amount of the penalties, the method by which the penalties are calculated and the times at which the penalties are payable.” This issue is right in DFNL’s lap.
While this ongoing problem at Central Dairies is Health Canada’s responsibility in some ways, DFNL holds a big chunk of it as the milk regulator under provincial law. There’s a huge public protection role in there and a company with souring milk on the market is something the milk regulator - hello, DFNL and Tom Osborne - is responsible for and should care about.
DFNL’s low profile is likely allowing them to slide by public attention, much the same as professional self-regulators for things like law, medicine, nursing, dentistry and so on and the supply management industries - eggs, poultry, and milk - all slip below public notice because they seldom do anything to draw attention to what they do or are supposed to do, anyway. They keep a low profile to avoid accountability even though they are supposed to protect the public. Provincial politicians are quite happy to let them skate just like they do with the health ones.
But at times like this, it might be an idea if politicians and the people responsible for fixing problems didn’t wait for someone to ask them a question so they can pat themselves on the back. Maybe they should not only do their jobs but be seen to be doing their jobs. After all, as much as sour milk is only going to make some people a bit queasy, preventable damage to a sector of the provincial economy is way worse and should make politicians and former politicians make sure things are getting sorted. We need leaders, not managers. It’s going to be harder to build back a local milk industry if it shrinks due to a few fixable mistakes just when it could be and should be getting stronger and bigger.