Consumers want the foods they eat to be nutritious, affordable and good-tasting. Increasingly, consumers care about the environmental impact of their food, and want to know that the products they buy were produced in an environmentally responsible way.

Dairy processors use a lot of water. Fresh water and wastewater can be a huge expense and a significant component of the utilities budget. The H2Oversight Service from U.S. Energy Services, Plymouth, Minn., offers rate tariff optimization, metering equipment confirmation, facility change monitoring, bypass opportunities and identification of operational savings.

Sales of milk continue to decline, and traditional grocery stores are losing market share. Consumers increasingly are buying milk at club stores and dollar stores, according to an analysis by Prime Consulting Group, Bannockburn, Ill., for Milk Processor Education Program, or MilkPEP, Washington, D.C.

The Portland, Maine, dairy processor takes another step toward its sustainability goals with the addition of three new hybrid delivery trucks to its fleet.

Innovative marketing plus effective in-store merchandising and support of its private labels demonstrate that Safeway Inc. has made the leap from thinking about private label as merely a low-price alternative to have on its shelves to treating its private labels as CPG companies treat their brands. The result — private-label sales growth at Safeway is outpacing branded sales growth by a three-to-one margin.

In a saturated landscape of cheese and dairy farmers in Wisconsin, one little goat farm is doing what it can to stand out with award-winning goat cheese and milk.

Safeway Inc. takes the mystery out of making ice cream. At its Bellevue, Wash., ice cream plant, silos, pasteurizers, stainless steel tubing, flavor vats, fillers and other equipment are all labeled as to their contents or function. There is even a label above a hand-crank pencil sharpener. That was put there either for the benefit of a younger generation raised on hand-held devices (instead of pencil and paper) or else it was an expression of an engineer’s sense of humor.

Crave Brothers, a family-owned and-operated dairy farm and cheese factory tucked away in Waterloo, Wis., is garnering attention with its award-winning farmstead cheeses and green story.

Chicago-based Bel Brands USA, makers of The Laughing Cow, Mini Babybel and Boursin cheese (among others) has become a rising star in the snacking and portable cheese category, having doubled its revenues in the last four years. Its Laughing Cow masterbrand (The Laughing Cow and Mini Babybel) is now America’s number one branded snacking cheese.