Changing consumer perspectives

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Growing trust in dairy was one of the goals of Midwest Dairy’s checkoff initiatives in 2025. These efforts included changing the perspective of climate and sustainability experts, educating emerging nutrition and public health professionals, and helping school nutrition professionals understand the nutritional value of dairy. Checkoff work also resulted in millions of pounds of incremental milk sold, thanks to store collaborations and more.

“We’re seeing shifts, (in perspective) even with our skeptical groups,” said Brenna Bobendrier, farmer relations manager with Midwest Dairy. “Once they see it firsthand, they have that knowledge, and they can start to ask those questions.”

Bobendrier presented about checkoff efforts at the Midwest Dairy regional meeting held March 10 in Rochester.

Midwest Dairy was able to increase trust in dairy at the Midwest Climate Resilience Conference.

“These are sustainability thought leaders, so they’re very concerned about the environment,” Bobendrier said. “They come here to learn more about what they can do to protect the environment.”

Midwest Dairy hosted a dairy farm tour for 15 attendees. Before embarking, they surveyed the attendees on their confidence in the environmental responsiblity of dairy farming as well as their confidence in the responsible cow care that farmers give. Before the tour, 80% of attendees had a negative perspective in both categories, including two attendees who live a vegan lifestyle.

“Those are the people we need to have the conversations with,” Bobendrier said. “We know that we might never change their mind, but at least they have more information.”

When the attendees were re-surveyed at the end of the tour, confidence in environmental responsibility had grown to 40% of attendees. Confidence in cow care had grown to 60% of attendees.

At the conference, Midwest Dairy also hosted a panel with three dairy farmers and a representative from Dairy Management Inc. Like the tour, attendees were surveyed before and after the panel. Before the panel, 13% of attendees had a positive perspective on the environmental responsibility of dairy farming. After the panel, this number had grown to 57%. In regards to cow care, 47% were confident in the cow care farmers give. Afterwards, this number had grown to 86% of attendees.

Another educational event hosted by Midwest Dairy was for emerging nutrition and public health professionals attending the University of Minnesota. These 33 young adults did two homework assignments with real examples from dairy farms about sustainability before going on a tour of a dairy farm. Trust in the environmental responsibility of dairy farming changed from 30% of attendees to 94%. Trust in cow care changed from 33% to 90%.

“(Eventually) they’re going to have their own clientele,” Bobendrier said. “Now they’re more apt to talk about why you can choose to have dairy in your diet, because they have the why behind it.”

Midwest Dairy also hosted a session with 48 attendees at the Minnesota School Nutrition Association Annual Conference about the nutritive value of dairy, sugar regulations for schools and how they relate to flavored milks, and milk allergies versus milk intolerance.

“It’s really important that our school nutrition professionals know why dairy is nutrient-rich and what it can contain for our students,” Bobendrier said.

Another area Midwest Dairy worked to grow trust was through social media influencers. These efforts included a 2-day event for seven food and lifestyle creators who posted about their experiences touring a dairy farm and making cheese.

“(Social media) is where our consumers are, so that’s where we have to shift our efforts to,” Bobendrier said.

Social media content does change perspectives, Bobendrier said.

“There’s an increase in trust when (Generation Z) are exposed to this type of content,” Bobendrier said. “As they’re scrolling, if they see an advertisement or video mentioning dairy, we do see that they’re becoming more trusting.”

Bobendrier also reported on how real dairy is performing versus alternatives in the dairy case. In 2025, alternative milk lost 23.7 million gallons of market share. Real dairy is about 90% of the volume of milk beverages sold.

“Our consumers are still choosing that real dairy milk,” Bobendrier said.

Cheese continues to be the No. 1 most popular dairy product, and real dairy cheese controls 99% of cheese market share.

“It’s more popular than ever,” Bobendrier said.

Three dairy products seeing double-digit growth in sales are cottage cheese at 14.4%, dairy creamer at 30.4% and cream spreads at 11.3%.

Bobendrier said increased cottage cheese consumption is likely due to the social media trend where cottage cheese is used in recipes to increase protein. She said cream spreads have become more popular with consumers building food boards. Dairy creamer sales are a result of consumers switching to creamers made with actual dairy, Bobendrier said.

Midwest Dairy is also assisting in innovation for new and novel food products that incorporate dairy products as a primary ingredient through the Midwest Dairy Accelerator contest, hosted in conjunction with VentureFuel. Contestants in 2025 were part of an 8-week, virtual program with mentorship and business coaching. At a live pitch event in September 2025, the winning contestant received $20,000. The winner was RoseBud Ice Cream’s soft-serve ice cream pouches.

A past winner, Bakr, has products going into Target nationwide this year. They are projected to sell 1 million bags of ready-to-bake or air fry cookie dough representing over 100,000 pounds of butter.

In Minnesota, Midwest Dairy supported local dairy promotion efforts through Undeniably Dairy Grants. In 2025, $220,000 was distributed to 76 projects. The top counties to utilize the grant were Winona, Stearns, Morrison, Brown and Houston.

At the dairy case in 2025, Kwik Trip collaborated with Midwest Dairy to promote five limited-time-only flavored milks. This activation resulted in over 1.6 million pounds of incremental milk sold. Incremental milk represents milk sold as a result of the activation above and beyond normal sales.

“When it’s matter of scarcity that they can only have it for a small amount of time, it really helps get people into the store,” Bobendrier said.

Midwest Dairy also worked with grocery stores Hy-Vee and Coborn’s Inc. These activations resulted in sales of 551,000 and 84,686 pounds of incremental milk, respectively.

In online grocery store sales, Midwest Dairy worked with Chicory to provide dairy ads while customers were online grocery shopping. These ads featured dairy-rich recipes with an ingredient “add to cart” button. The activation resulted in over 5.3 million pounds of incremental milk.

“It’s really (about) how can we be convenient to get dairy in people’s carts?” Bobendrier said. “They might not even realize how much dairy is in that recipe, but they are going to click ‘add to cart,’ and there they are, increasing our dairy sales.”