Monday, August 18, 2014

[Advanced] Where Has All the Milk Gone? (1) 2014/08/18

Milk’s popularity falls as trendier drinks surge

Got almond milk?

More and more consumers do. They’ve also got soy milk, coconut milk, flax milk and all sorts of trendy juices and bottled waters. But good old milk — the moo kind — keeps fading from grocery lists.

Milk’s rate of decline in 2011 and 2012 was the highest in more than a decade, though per capita consumption has been falling for years and dropped 25 percent from 1975 through 2012, according to federal data.

Milk drinking by both kids and adults has particularly declined during prime-time: meals. The tall, cool glass of milk with a sandwich at lunch or a burger at dinner is increasingly an anachronism.

“If I’m with another adult and they have milk during dinner, it seems kind of nostalgic,” said Amy Bryant, a Minnesota mother of two daughters. “I was a milk lover and I grew up drinking it. You just kind of had milk with your dinner.”

A constant decline 
While producers have offset milk’s decline by selling more cheese, nearly tripling its consumption in the past four decades, the industry hasn’t been able to halt the slide in milk demand.

Recently, it even shelved its venerable “Got milk?” campaign, with the milk-mustached celebrities. New ads will emphasize milk’s protein content.

Katie Anderson, insight director at Minneapolis marketing firm Colle and McVoy, said the old campaign may have “lost its relevance.”

“Milk has just been sleepy,” Anderson said. “We have the juice people, the water people — everybody else is taking off.”

Alarmingly for the industry, even the most devoted milk drinkers — kids — aren’t consuming as much of the white stuff as they once did.

“It’s kind of the younger generation we’ve lost, ” said K.J. Burrington of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research.


Vocabulary Focus
surge n.
a sudden, large increase
- a surge of support for the candidate

fade v.
to disappear gradually

per capita adj.
/pɚˈkæpətə/
for each person, especially when considering all of the people in a group
- The state's average per capita income is $35,000.

anachronism n.
/əˈnækrəˌnɪzəm/
someone or something placed in the wrong period in history, or something that belongs to the past rather than the present
- The novel is full of anachronisms.
- He's an old-fashioned politician who is seen by many of his colleagues as an anachronism.

nostalgic adj.
/nɑˈstælʤɪk/
feeling happy and also slightly sad when you think about things that happened in the past
- Seeing pictures of my old friends made me feel very nostalgic.

offset v.
to cancel or reduce the effect of (something) : to create an equal balance between two things
- The limited storage space in the house is offset by the large garage.

shelve v.
to delay action on something

venerable adj.
respected, especially because of long experience or age

take off [phrasal verb]
to quickly become very successful or popular


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