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Dairies sold adults on milk
Cheap, safe, surplus
Dairies had ramped up production to supply evaporated milk to allies in the war. Milk had also become cheap and safe: pasteurization killed most of the bacteria, refrigeration and the cold chain kept it from going bad quickly, and cattle were bred and fed to give a lot more milk.
Government and marketing
The milk industry had a powerful marketing organization, and it promoted the health of drinking milk. The government distributed milk in schools and, in partnership with the dairy industry, advertised how important it was and how it would make kids grow big and strong.
Drinking milk went from something for babies and kids to something adults should do too. The US government started recommending that adults drink a pint of milk a day, and today the advice for adults is a pint and a half.
Campaigns that stuck
The campaigns kept going through the 20th century. Vince Lombardi, whose Green Bay Packers dominated football in the 1960s, credited milk for his players' success, and a jingle told kids that milk does the body good. Americans of all ages drank more and more of it for about a century, and today they drink about half the amount of cow's milk they did in 1975.
How did evaporated milk work?
Evaporated milk is made by heating milk to remove about 60 percent of its water. It is then canned and sterilized, so it keeps for months without refrigeration. Gail Borden patented condensed milk in 1856, and Union armies bought it during the Civil War. Condensed milk was the sweetened version, and evaporated milk was introduced later.
How did Got Milk? sell more milk?
The California Milk Processor Board launched Got Milk? in 1993. The ads showed people who were about to eat something and found they had run out, so the campaign was built around the frustration of not having milk. That approach made the product's absence the subject of the ad. Dairy promotion in the United States is funded by a checkoff program, in which farmers pay 15 cents per hundredweight of milk, under a 1983 federal law.
How did refrigeration build the cold chain?
Early milk moved in iced rail cars and horse-drawn wagons that carried block ice. Home refrigerators spread through American households in the 1930s and 1940s. According to US census data, roughly 8 percent of households had one in 1930, and more than 80 percent had one by 1950.
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