Milk sales have doubled at McDonald's since the launch last year of single-serve, plastic, re-closeable bottles. Wendy's has had similar success. Neither restaurant has done it on the cheap. Milk in a paper carton was selling for about 89 cents per half pint; in the plastic, half-pint bottles, milk is selling for as much as $1.19. It is not a commodity. As I write this, Burger King has just completed a two-month long test of plastic bottles. By the time you read this, the folks at BK, the third largest quick-service burger chain, may have already announced a national roll-out for early 2006.

Family-owned Steuben Foods Inc. , Jamaica, N.Y., has established another business-Whitney Foods Inc. -to market its new line of aseptic, single-serve smoothies: Yo on the Go™.

Ice cream and sherbet sales remain flat, and what's worse, novelty sales are now also showing a steady pattern of negligible declines.

Datamonitor has listed the top 10 mega-trends and all have packaging relevance. As a matter of fact, packaging will be an important enabler to these trends in many ways.

There's a new addition to Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo Inc.'s non-carbonated beverage portfolio-a line of flavored milk beverages called Quaker™ Milk Chillers™. Made with 2% reduced-fat milk and fortified with calcium

Fristam Pumps The Fristam Shear Blender for inline mixing features a rotor-stator system that eliminates unblended product and prevents the formation of lumps in the mixture. This increases product consistency,

These four words have sold a lot of beer. And I'm convinced that they can sell help sell a lot of milk and a lot of dairy foods.

Some folks are asking: Why is the milk price so high? ...for the second consecutive year?

Latin America may be the hottest region in the world right now in terms of dairy product introductions. According to data from the Global New Products Data Base, Latin America has introduced a higher number of new products and line extensions each year for the last two or three years in the four sub-categories shown here. It is also on track to introduce more new products in 2005 than it did in 2004 in each of the sub-categories.

It was a mixed bag product-by-product, but total dairy sales were strong during 2004.