Dairy Sector – 2022 Price Increase Outlook & Category
Adoption of Alternative Offerings – 14 October 2021
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Specialist: Mike McCully (MM)
Title:
Moderator: Nyree Hinton (NH), Third Bridge Sector Analyst
President at The McCully Group LLC
Agenda:
1. Category trends across yoghurt, milk, cheese and ice cream
2. Margin opportunities, price trends, alternative product offerings and private label
3. Better-for-you innovations and sugar reduction recommendations
4. Supply chain bottlenecks, price increases, global demand and competitive outlook
Contents
Q: What is your overview of the dairy industry and supply chain structure, from the manufacturers to the
farmers? Which areas are most strained or challenged?
3
Q: Why has there been consumer hesitancy or decreased demand around milk and a category shift to cheese
and butter? Is there something fundamental to consider or is it more about supply issues and product being
less available?
4
Q: How has consumer behaviour impacted traditional dairy farmers if people are eating rather than drinking
4
dairy products? How significant is the industry contraction? Is it minus 2% or minus 5% per year?
Q: What implications does the large drop-off in farmers have for retailers or industry pricing?
Q: What are the margin opportunities and main drivers of cheese and butter?
5
5
Q: How is pricing trending across the milk, cheese and butter categories? Can price increases be passed on
quicker? You focused on cheese and respective investments – is that one of the more promising categories? 6
Q: What dynamics are playing into pricing opportunities across the convenience or food service channels?
How are farmers or manufacturers evaluating the opportunities across those channels?
6
Q: Do the alternative milk and butter offerings typically have an extended shelf life? What are the dynamics
or some pros and cons of the alternative products in traditional dairy farming?
7
Q: Private label has performed well in traditional dairy milk but how is it faring in the alternative segment? 8
Q: How is the natural and organic trend impacting the dairy industry as a whole? The definition for natural
won’t be the same for everyone but how is that dynamic broadly impacting dairy?
8
Q: How have consumer perceptions changed considering the various brands taking advantage of some of the
new trends, such as Oatly? How significant is branding throughout these categories? Milk has a large private
label presence but how does branding translate into butter or alternative products? Which manufacturers are
9
leading the charge in this segment?
Q: How are the bottlenecks, inflation and distribution issues translating into dairy throughout the supply
chain? Is it mostly creating pressure on distribution and warehousing? What’s the general sentiment?
9
Q: Who appears to be eating most of the price cost? Are the farmers, manufacturers or some of the retailers
trying to repackage product for their consumers? Who is being hit the hardest?
10
Q: How much of the price increases are driven by supply side vs manufacturers taking the opportunity to
raise prices? Commodity manufacturers such as Tyson or Cargill are experiencing record years of
profitability, but it doesn’t seem as if they’ve had significant manufacturing cost increases. What dynamics
are playing into this inflationary shift with so many companies taking advantage of the chance to pass on
price increases?
Q: Where is there notable global demand for the different categories we’ve discussed? You touched on
exports earlier.
10
11
Q: How hard is it to get the products outside of the US? You highlighted the port issues and I know the US is
11
experiencing some import challenges. Are container shipping costs still up 100% and 200%?
Q: What are some considerations around the domestic product in the US for institutions such as hospitals
and schools? How have demand and volume trended given the substantial up and down from kids going
back to school, mask or no mask mandates and so on?
Q: Who is dominating the institutional segment? Is it the private label manufacturers?
12
12
Dairy Sector – 2022 Price Increase Outlook & Category
Adoption of Alternative Offerings
Transcription begins at 00:00:04 of the recorded material
NH: Welcome to Third Bridge Forum’s Interview entitled Dairy Sector – 2022 Price Increase Outlook &
Category Adoption of Alternative Offerings. I’m Nyree Hinton and I’ll be facilitating today’s Interview with Mr
Mike McCully, President at the McCully Group LLC.
Mike, before we get started with today’s Interview, please state I agree or I disagree to the following statement:
You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any such
information, or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.
MM: I agree.
NH: Thank you, Mike. Could you start by giving the audience an introduction of your background and various
roles you’ve held in the industry?
MM: I’ve worked in the dairy industry for actually just a bit over 25 years. About 15 or 16 at Kraft Foods, in
dairy supply chain purchasing, and the last nine-plus years I’ve had my own consulting business where I work
pretty much exclusively with dairy. It ranges from working with some large farms in the United States to dairy
processors, dairy cooperatives, all the way up to global food companies, and have basically a wide view across
the entire dairy supply chain from the farm level out to the consumer.
[00:01:21]
Q: What is your overview of the dairy industry and supply chain structure, from the manufacturers to the
farmers? Which areas are most strained or challenged?
MM: In the US, for a quick perspective, last year was very disruptive, obviously, with COVID. The low point
was last spring, April, May, when a lot of milk was dumped. There are a lot of dairy products that are sold in
the food service and through restaurants and schools, and when those markets effectively shut off, you can’t
shut the cow off, so for a period of time, a month or two, there was a lot of milk that was displaced, and in
some cases was dumped. By the middle of the year, that got a lot better, and the industry adjusted pretty
quickly, and as we got into 2021, I think most people were hoping or thinking that we’d get back to normal,
and it has to some degree. The demand at retail for dairy products has still been elevated this year, particularly
for cheese and for butter, not as much for milk, and food service demand has come back and exports have
been good too, so from an overall demand standpoint, things are much better this year than last year. On the
supply side, it has been a bit more challenging in certain parts of the country. Feed prices are up significantly
this year relative to last year. Dairy farms in the west have been dealing with drought and hot weather,
particularly in California, even up in the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest. We’ve seen cow numbers top-
out back in the spring and have been declining a bit, so there’s some contraction in the overall dairy herd. July
and August, on-farm margins were probably the low for the year, and we’ve seen milk production growth slow
because of it. It’s really a tale of different regions. I would say the eastern half of the country, the middle part
of the country, the eastern half of the country is doing relatively better than the western part of the country
because of the reasons I’ve said around feed cost, weather, and so forth.
Private and confidential 3
[00:03:45]
Q: Why has there been consumer hesitancy or decreased demand around milk and a category shift to cheese
and butter? Is there something fundamental to consider or is it more about supply issues and product being
less available?
MM: No, the supply is available, this is all demand. It’s not necessarily, I would say, that consumers are
hesitant, the consumers just are not choosing milk as the beverage nearly as much as they used to, and there
are a variety of reasons for that, and a lot of these are longer-term trends. First, people are eating less and less
cereal and, basically, cereal is milk’s best friend because if you sit down for a bowl of cereal you’re pouring
milk on it, and as people eat less cereal they’re consuming less milk. Also, the majority of milk is consumed at
breakfast time or in the morning, so as people eat less cereal they’ve got less milk. That’s one of the major
changes, and this is not just in the last year or so, this has been going on for the last decade or more where
we’ve seen a downturn in cereal consumption. In addition, there are just more and more and more alternative
beverages. It’s sports drinks. In the last decade or so, or two, it’s been the alternative dairy beverages, the nut
milks, so to speak, so almond. It was soy 10 or 15 years or more ago, then it’s almond, it’s oats, so all the nut
beverages and, like I said, different juices, all kinds of just more and more choices for consumers, and they’re
drinking less and less milk. Those are a couple of the main reasons we’ve seen a continued decline in the per
capita milk consumption, and I think those are long-term trends that will continue in the future.
Another one that the dairy industry is very interested or concerned about is the decline in milk consumption in
youth. A lot of studies have shown that, as a kid, if they don’t start drinking milk as a kid, they’re not going to
start drinking milk as an adult, so basically you lose an entire generation of milk drinkers if they don’t start
drinking milk, particularly in school. In the last decade or so, it really probably started in the Obama
administration with the reduction of sugar and fat and things like that in school lunches, and milk was a
target. They, in some cases, took out chocolate milk, flavoured milks that kids like, so instead they’ve got a 1%
white milk in a may or may not be very cold cardboard box, and that’s not the best experience for a kid, and if
they don’t like that, they’re not going to drink milk. That’s been a big challenge that the dairy industry has
been trying to address, and that’s not an easy one to fix either. Again, it’s not just one reason that people are
drinking less milk, there are a variety of them, and the main takeaway from all this is people, they’re eating
their dairy now and they’re not drinking their dairy. Where in the past they drank milk, now cheese
consumption continues to increase, butter consumption is up a lot also in the last five, six, seven years or so,
so the takeaway is people are eating their dairy now, not drinking it.
[00:07:45]
Q: How has consumer behaviour impacted traditional dairy farmers if people are eating rather than drinking
dairy products? How significant is the industry contraction? Is it minus 2% or minus 5% per year?
MM: Depends on which metric you look at. If you look at total supply, which is probably the first place to
start, it’s not contracting, it’s growing. Milk production grows pretty much every year. YoY on average, it’s
about 1.5% growth. If you look at a cumulative annualised growth rate over the last 5-10 years, it’s somewhere
close to 1.5% growth, and it’s quite rare to see milk production decline. From that standpoint, I can say that it’s
continuing to grow. The history lesson here, over the last 20 years, there have only been two years where milk
production declined. One was 2001, when it was down 1%, the other was 2009, when it was down 0.1%. Every
other year it’s grown, and on average, again, 1.4%, so close to 1.5% growth. That’s the positive story in terms of
overall US milk production. When you talk about concentration, now you’re getting into the number of farms,
and the number of farms, they have been declining since records have been kept on it, good records from back
in the ’80s and ’90s. Again, for perspective, I would say a good solid number would be in 2003, when the
USDA started reporting this, there were just over 70,000 licensed dairy farms in the United States. In 2020,
that was down to under 32,000. We’ve lost half of the dairy farms from 2003 to 2020, on average losing about
5% of the farms per year. I’ve written several different research white papers on this, and I’ve said, and
continue to believe, that there will be half as many farms by the time we get to 2030. The consolidation, the
pace of consolidation has actually been picking up in recent years, and I think that only continues going
forward, for several reasons.
Private and confidential 4
The average age of dairy farmers in the United States, farmers in general, is in the 50s. If they don’t have kids
that want to stay on the farm, at some point in the not-to-distant future, they make the decision to sell out, but
the farms retire, the farmers retire, but the cows don’t. A lot of those cows end up going to farms that are
expanding, and the farms that are expanding are mainly the large or very large farms, so we end up getting
more and more concentration of milk being produced on the larger farms. That’s a trend that’s been going on
for quite a while, that’s not just in dairy, it’s in other parts of agriculture as well.
[00:11:20]
Q: What implications does the large drop-off in farmers have for retailers or industry pricing?
MM: Like I said, the main thing to keep in mind is the milk production continues to increase, so the milk is
there. There is increasing concentration geographically, so this has implications then to, say, maybe fresh
milk, or if you’ve got a plant in an area where there are shrinking milk supplies, at some point that plant is not
viable and will have to close, and we have seen that and will continue to see that going forward. However, milk
tends not to move a long way, so the growth in milk in the last 10 years has actually been in the middle part of
the country and really concentrated in a small number of states. Western Kansas, the Panhandle of Texas,
Colorado and eastern South Dakota have seen the largest percentage growth over the last 10 years. Michigan,
northern Indiana, even upper midwest states, western New York – those are also growth, Idaho as well.
California, the largest state for milk production in the country really hasn’t seen much growth at all. Total
supply is still there, in some cases maybe there are some additional transportation costs going into retailers,
but I would actually argue what’s happened with the growth of milk production in plants in the middle part of
the country, it’s actually closer to consumers than 10 years or so ago when it had a relatively larger share being
produced on the West Coast. I don’t think there’s really much impact at all, probably, to retailers and, say,
food service companies going forward. In fact, some of the things that those companies want is more around
traceability, sustainability, things like that, and they have a better chance of getting those done with a smaller
number of large farms than they do with a lot of little farms.
[00:13:39]
Q: What are the margin opportunities and main drivers of cheese and butter?
MM: Cheese, people eat more cheese every year. I would say 2009-10 the pattern levelled off just a bit and
there was some question whether had we hit peak cheese, can people eat any more cheese? It turns out they
can, the growth rate continued upward after that. A lot of it’s driven by pizza. Roughly 45% of all cheese in the
US is consumed through food service and almost half of that is pizza, another quarter of that is sandwiches,
QSR burgers, cheeseburgers, things like that, and as people are eating out more and eating more pizza all the
time, we’re continuing to see growth in that space. About 35% or so is sold at retail, that’s more stable,
although last year it was up a bunch, we typically see a couple of percent growth in retail cheese, and then the
other, roughly 20%, is in industrial ingredient usages, and that continues to grow too. People question about
can American consumers eat more cheese? Right now, the per capita consumption is in the mid-30s or so. If
you look at some of the European countries, they’re up in the 50s, 50-something pounds per year, so from that
standpoint, there’s still a lot of way to go and I think it will continue to be. Cheese has been the growth story
for the US dairy industry, I think it will continue to be that way.
There are a lot of new investments coming in. Just about two weeks ago Leprino cheese, Leprino Foods, which
is the largest mozzarella cheese manufacturer in the world, announced they’re building an USD 870m new
cheese plant in west Texas, it’s an unheard of figure for a cheese plant. Hilmar Cheese, a large cheese producer
of American cheese, they’re going to build a new cheese plant in western Kansas. Agropur, a Canadian
cooperative that owns a bunch of cheese plants in the United States, just announced last week a USD 170m
plant expansion in Wisconsin. Glanbia, an Irish company, just opened a USD 500m plant in Michigan in the
last year. There are just, again, huge investments in the cheese space because it’s been a growth category and
Private and confidential 5
will continue to be that way, and exports are growing too. There continues to be good export potential into
Mexico, into Southeast Asia, and some of the other countries, for US cheese. Roughly only about 6% or so of
the US cheese is exported, so we’ve got a lot of opportunity going forward in the cheese market.
Then on butter, 15-20 years or more ago, the headlines were butter would kill you, eat margarine, eat
vegetable oils, and 8-10 years ago, the science changed to where fats in general are good, dairy fat is good and
margarine will kill you. We’ve actually seen, since 2014 or so, an increase in per capita consumption of butter
across food service, across retail, you name it, so butter is back. I think that trend will continue for a while, and
that overall dairy fat has been viewed a lot better from a science standpoint than it has in past years. I think
butter and dairy fat in general will be positive trends going forward too on the demand side.
[00:17:25]
Q: How is pricing trending across the milk, cheese and butter categories? Can price increases be passed on
quicker? You focused on cheese and respective investments – is that one of the more promising categories?
MM: Yes, absolutely. On fluid milk, roughly 60% or so of fluid milk in the country at retail is private label,
store brand, and for the most part, that pretty well follows a market price. The government announces a
monthly milk price and that’s usually tied pretty closely to where pricing is at the retail level. The branded
products don’t move as much, the private label can. What we’ve also found over the years is that the milk
demand is a lot more elastic than it used to be, so if you raise price, you get less sales, sales drop. That wasn’t
the case maybe 20-30 years or more ago, but there is more sensitivity around pricing on milk. For the most
part, I would say the cost increases this year, a fair bit of that has been passed on, maybe not all of the
packaging costs, but transportation and things like that. Fluid milk processing, particular private label, is
already a very low-margin business to start with, so they don’t really have a lot of room to work with so they
need to try to pass as many of those costs on as possible.
On the cheese side, I would say from a private label standpoint, the price increase, the raw material cheese
price really hasn’t changed all that much, it’s been pretty stable this year, so from the raw material cheese
standpoint, that cost really hasn’t been that big of a factor. Everything else has, labour, packaging,
transportation, and things like that. I would say back in the spring there were 3-5% increases from brands and
others, there’s another one probably coming here in Q4, some are actually going with an 8% or 10% increase to
start the year. There is more food price inflation coming, or inflation on the dairy and on cheese, that will hit
in early next year, so we really haven’t seen the full impact of that yet. I’m expecting demand to drop off
because of it, but again, we haven’t seen the full impact. It’s a similar story for butter, that there’ll be some
higher prices as they flow through into next year. Typically, you see a lot of featuring and deals, sales and stuff
through the holiday period. Once you get through December, late December, early January, then all of a
sudden the deals slow down. If you get these list price increases with less deals, then, all of a sudden, you’re
going to have higher net retail shelf prices, and at that point, I think that’s when you start to see a bigger
slowdown in sales.
[00:20:44]
Q: What dynamics are playing into pricing opportunities across the convenience or food service channels?
How are farmers or manufacturers evaluating the opportunities across those channels?
MM: On fluid milk, when I talk about fluid milk, I talk about the white milk in a gallon jug, and there’s really
not a lot of opportunity there, that’s a declining category, over-capacity, low margins, it’s just a rough business.
Two of the largest companies in that space in the last 1.5 years, or early last year, went bankrupt. Dean Foods
went bankrupt, Borden went bankrupt. Dean dissolved and largely bought by Dairy Farmers of America, the
nation’s biggest dairy cooperative, and Borden was bought by another private equity firm, just to give you an
idea of how the unhealthy the fluid milk business is. The opportunities on that are the specialised milks, so
things like Fairlife, which has been a good example of value-added milk, A2 Milk, organic, organic grass-fed,
Private and confidential 6
all those more speciality milks and dairy beverages, those are higher margin and they have seen good growth
rates. As I tell people, if you think the future is white milk in a gallon jug, I don’t like that future, I don’t think
there is a future there, but if you want to make value-added dairy beverages, either 100% dairy or maybe
blends with plant-based products, then I think there is a consumer demand for those products, which is a
better outlook.
Cheese continues to grow. The main categories are mozzarella and American, but there are also more and
more speciality cheeses, and as the American, the consumer palate broadens out to different flavours and
different styles, we’ll continue to see growth in more speciality cheese types. Butter is similar, so it’s not just a
plain old stick of butter. The Irish butter is very popular, I think it has become the number two branded butter
in the United States behind Land O’Lakes. There are others, high-fat butters, European-style butters, so there
are a number of things going on in that category as well, which is positive. Also, for perspective, 80% of the
milk marketed in the United States is through dairy farmer-owned cooperatives. When we talk about
opportunities for dairy farmers, a fair bit of that depends on what their cooperatives are doing. I think
cooperatives like Land O’Lakes, Dairy Farmers of America, Prairie Farms, as examples, are companies or co-
ops that have pretty broad manufacturing networks and own their own products. They’re effectively vertically
integrated from the cow to the farm out to the consumer with brands and different products. Some of the best
examples, depending on where you’re at in the country, Tillamook Cheese in Oregon, which is now a national
distribution of excellent cheese and ice cream, or if you’re in the east, you’re probably more familiar with
Cabot, which is owned by Agri-Mark, both of those are dairy farm-owned cooperatives, so again, examples of
forward integration from dairy farmers through their cooperatives.
[00:24:13]
Q: Do the alternative milk and butter offerings typically have an extended shelf life? What are the dynamics or
some pros and cons of the alternative products in traditional dairy farming?
MM: I talked about margarine earlier. Margarine is an alternative to butter that’s been around for a long, long
time. So, talk about dairy alternatives, they’re not new, they’re just different formats. I would say, from the
butter standpoint, the margarine business has been in a lot of trouble in the last 8-10 years or so, due to the
shift in guidance and science around from a health impact, so that’s one where it hasn’t been that big of a deal,
and butter is viewed as better. Also, in the last 5-10 years, the trend is towards clean labels, an ingredient line
that doesn’t sound like it came out of a laboratory, and butter is about as clean as you can get. It’s sweet cream
and maybe salt and maybe colour and that’s it, and in some cases not even colour. It’s a very simple product
that’s been on trend here for a number of different reasons.
As you get to cheese, I’ll start with cheese, the alternatives on cheese, frankly, aren’t very good at all. There are
a few vegetable-based cheeses. They’re a tiny, tiny volume, tiny category. There is a tiny niche of demand
there. Those products, they don’t taste as good, they don’t look as good, they don’t perform as good, they don’t
brown, they don’t stretch, they don’t do whatever, and those products have not been able to come anywhere
close to replicating the product attributes of real cheese. From that standpoint, I’d say yoghurt is halfway in
between, where we actually have seen some plant-based products in yoghurt, that there’s a little bigger volume
and demand for those products. The main place where we see the substitution effect is on beverage, the
beverage milk. Some consumers, they won’t drink dairy for whatever reason. It could be lactose intolerance, it
could be concerns over animal welfare, or other things like that, vegetarian, vegan or whatever, so they’re not
going to drink milk at all. I just saw a study the other day, a report on a study the other day that 90%-
something of households in the US have both a plant-based milk and a dairy milk in their refrigerator, so it
gives you an idea. It’s not an either/or, in most cases it’s an and. People may be drinking milk or giving milk to
their kids, dairy milk, but they may be using an almond milk or something, or Oatly, in their morning coffee.
That kind of gives you an idea across the different products, but again, the substitution effect of the plant-
based competition has been probably most noticed on the beverage side.
Private and confidential 7
[00:27:51]
Q: Private label has performed well in traditional dairy milk but how is it faring in the alternative segment?
MM: I don’t think they’ve really got into as much because it’s not a commodity. The white milk in a gallon jug
is a commodity and a chunk of cheese in an eight-ounce package, or even shreds, that’s pretty much a
commodity, a stick of a butter is a commodity. You see pretty heavy private label penetration in fluid milk, in
natural cheese and butter, but not nearly as much, say, in yoghurt. Yoghurt, the majority of the market share is
all the brands, the vast majority of the market share is the brands and particularly the big three. When you get
into the plant-based side, and I assume it will come over time, but right now they’ve been viewed more as a
value-added premium product. Consumers have been paying that premium for a Silk, for an Oatly, for
whatever plant-based beverage that’s out there, Califia Farms, all the different brands, and really haven’t seen
that much penetration yet in the private label in those categories, I think because of the brand equity and the
premium status of those products. I think the other point is, I’m just not sure if there’s the overall volume
there either, private label. You do see it more in Whole Foods, maybe a Trader Joe’s, some of the retailers that
are focused more on that organic or natural, that sort of market, but in terms of the mainstream retailers, the
volume isn’t there and their focus isn’t really on those products as much. It’s a lot smaller volume category,
and they haven’t had the reason to move into those products vs the much bigger volume products.
[00:30:11]
Q: How is the natural and organic trend impacting the dairy industry as a whole? The definition for natural
won’t be the same for everyone but how is that dynamic broadly impacting dairy?
MM: Organic fluid milk, in the last 1.5 years or so, is about 6% of total fluid milk consumption. It was 5%
before COVID, it’s up to 6% or so. Part of it is organic milk is heavily indexed to retail sales vs food service. The
last year-and-a-half has helped retail sales and helped organic much more than conventional milk. I think
we’re seeing already this year, in recent months, that organic fluid milk sales are declining because people are
going back out and they’re not drinking organic milk as much out in restaurants as they would at home. I think
we’ll continue to see organic as a niche market, call it 5-6% or so. It’s really been steady over the last five years
or so, absent the COVID year. That’s been about it in terms of dairy. It’s interesting to see this in other product
attributes too, consumers seem to be very concerned about things like organic, or what have you, or rBST-free
in fluid milk, but the same concerns don’t translate to manufactured dairy products, other dairy products, that
it’s made out of something else. They don’t have the same concerns about cheese or butter or yoghurt or ice
cream as they do about fluid milk. The organic penetration in cheese and butter is really, really small. The
medium step there is yoghurt, you do see a little more penetration of organic yoghurt in that category, but
once you get to cheese and butter, it’s a tiny, tiny portion of the overall category. I just don’t think there’s going
to be much there, consumers just don’t really seem to care that much.
Grass-fed is another area that there’s increasing interest in, organic and/or grass-fed. Like I said, the
Kerrygold butter and cheese, they advertise and they market that they’re coming from grass-fed cows in
Ireland, and they’ve done a very good job capitalising on that, New Zealand to a lesser extent, so I think there
is something there too. Maybe that’s the main point I’m just going to talk about, overall dairy product demand
and consumers. In the past, the group of consumers for dairy was more of a homogeneous group, and what
we’re seeing in the last decade, for a variety of reasons, there’s no one consumer anymore, that you’ve got a lot
more subsegments of consumers. Dairy companies, and food companies in general, need to do more work on
developing products not just for the masses, but for individual segments, which again, it’s more skewed, it’s
more product offerings, it’s more complexity, it’s more cost, but that’s where the consumer is at, and I think
will continue to be going to.
Private and confidential 8
[00:33:53]
Q: How have consumer perceptions changed considering the various brands taking advantage of some of the
new trends, such as Oatly? How significant is branding throughout these categories? Milk has a large private
label presence but how does branding translate into butter or alternative products? Which manufacturers are
leading the charge in this segment?
MM: Go back a number of years ago, and I would say, in general, 20-plus years ago, the private label quality
was substandard. I’d say in the last 15-20 years or so, the quality of private label products in a number of
categories has come up to or in some cases exceeded the quality of the branded products. That, to me, has
been a huge shift. I remember being in Europe probably 10 or 12 or 15 years ago and seeing how strong the
private label penetration was in a lot of categories, and I was like, “That’s what’s coming to the US,” and that
has been the case. I think that’s been a challenge for a number of those branded companies that have basically
found themselves in commodity categories, the margins have shrunk and it’s been tough going. A great
example is Kraft getting out of the natural cheese business and selling off their natural cheese business. At its
core, that was Kraft Foods, was the cheese business, but they’re selling it off. Instead, what we’ve seen is some
of the big companies, some do better than others, are coming out with new products, new brands, and so forth,
or you have a lot of new companies, like Oatly. Oatly didn’t exist five years ago, I don’t think. Oat milk, who in
the hell wanted oak milk? Now, they’re talking about raising billions of dollars, spending billions of dollars on
marketing and so forth. It’s a great success story. I think that’s one. You go back in the yoghurt category 15
years or so ago, with Chobani, basically developing Greek yoghurt. Greek yoghurt wasn’t in the US market,
Greek yoghurt became a huge deal and transformed the yoghurt category for a number of years. It’s been
commoditised over time, and if you look at the classic lifestyle or life cycle of products, they’re seeing the same
thing there. I think new products, whether it’s dairy alternatives, even in the dairy space, Fairlife is a good
example of a new dairy product, I think that’s the challenge for brands and companies, is to do the work on
R&D and marketing and develop those products, and as you probably know, a lot of them don’t succeed, but
the ones that do pay off the ones that don’t.
[00:37:13]
Q: How are the bottlenecks, inflation and distribution issues translating into dairy throughout the supply
chain? Is it mostly creating pressure on distribution and warehousing? What’s the general sentiment?
MM: Everybody I talk to says it’s terrible, and back in the spring it was terrible, and the hope was it would get
better, and it’s gotten worse. I’ll go through the supply chain. I’ll start at the farm level. At the farm level,
labour availability had been a problem before COVID, it’s worse now, cost, availability and so forth. There’s a
lot of immigrant labour that works on dairy farms in the United States, particularly the big farms, immigration
has been and continues to be a problem. Farm groups in general have been pushing for immigration reform to
get more farm labourers into the US. That is a challenge at the farm level. Then you move to the milk
processing plant. Even getting milk from the farm to the plant is becoming more challenging because of a
shortage of drivers for trucks. Then you get to the plant and you’ve got the same sorts of issues, the high cost of
labour, availability of labour. A lot of the big modern dairy plants are pretty automated, so it’s not that big of a
problem as maybe other areas, which we’ll talk about here in a second, but it’s a challenge there too. At the
plant side, and I guess all along the way, it’s inflation, whether it’s labour, packaging, raw materials. If you’re
at the farm level, you’ve got cost increases in feed and other materials you’re buying, availability of stuff is a
problem, when you get to the plant level, as I said, they talk about labour, packaging, cost structures, utilities.
Then moving stuff from the processing plant to a secondary manufacturer or secondary processing, or
packaging or to retail or to warehouses, that trucking is a problem. Particularly if you’re moving stuff off the
West Coast in the middle part of the country, it is extremely expensive and just availability of trucks is a
problem. Then where we tend to see more problems on the labour front is in what’s called secondary
packaging, cut-and-wrap for operations for cheese, where they take big blocks of cheese and package them
into chunks or shreds or slices, that’s a lot more labour-intensive. Those companies are really having a
challenge getting enough labour and keeping labour. I was talking to one of the big butter companies
yesterday, and I asked him what the holiday season was looking like, and he goes, “I hope it’s horrible,”
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because if their orders pick up they won’t be able to fill them because they don’t have enough labour, just to
give you an idea how bad things are. That’s in the domestic market.
There’s also, when you talk about milk powder and whey products and some of the other dairy products, a lot
of that is exported and it’s well-aware of the issues when it comes to shipping. Companies are several months
behind on moving product out, if they can do it. Another company told me yesterday they’re actually losing a
supply line into the Middle East because of changes in shipping. Whether it’s getting an empty box to load to
go to the port, to get a truck to go to the port, getting it through the port, all of that is a mess and likely stays a
mess out through next year. Inflation, logistic problems. Go back, 2020, everybody was happy 2020 was over,
hoped 2021 got back to normal, 2021 has just been a different set of challenges. Right now, people hope 2022
gets back to normal, but the way it’s looking in some cases, we’re still going to have a lot of problems, a lot of
challenges around inflation, overall inflation, labour availability, shipping and logistics issues, those things
don’t seem to be going away. In summary, it’s a mess and it looks like, unfortunately, it’s going to be a mess for
a while.
[00:41:44]
Q: Who appears to be eating most of the price cost? Are the farmers, manufacturers or some of the retailers
trying to repackage product for their consumers? Who is being hit the hardest?
MM: I would say right now it’s actually been split fairly evenly. Farmers have been taking cost increases on
the feed and things like that. They’ve taken a hit on margins through the summer, but they’ve reacted by
culling off some cows, milk production is down, prices have come back up, so from that standpoint, I think
things have gotten directionally better than where they were a couple of months ago. Farmers tend to have a
pretty tough time passing any sorts of cost increases through, it just doesn’t work that way. They’re in a
commodity market so they have to adjust on the farms through production or do what they can to lower their
costs, become more efficient, and they’re doing that. When you get to the processing side, either in primary
manufacturing or secondary manufacturing, they are able to push through some price increases. If you’re in
private label and you’ve got more formulaic in terms of your cost, then they have an easier time doing that. If
you’re a buyer at a food service company or a retailer, you never want a price increase, and you’re always going
to push back on a price increase, however in this environment, in an overall inflationary environment, it has
been easier, relatively easier for suppliers to push through price increases to their customers because the
customers, everybody sees it, everybody knows it’s there, and while you can resist it to a point, it is real. We’re
seeing, I would say, less resistance to pushing those price increases through the supply chain out to the
consumer than what I’ve seen in a long time. Again, we’re in an overall inflationary environment and it’s not
just a little, costs aren’t up just a little, they’re up a lot. Of course, lumber prices are down, but if you’re buying
a car or appliances or whatever, pretty much everything is moving up in cost because of a variety of reasons,
and I think food is part of that story.
[00:44:23]
Q: How much of the price increases are driven by supply side vs manufacturers taking the opportunity to raise
prices? Commodity manufacturers such as Tyson or Cargill are experiencing record years of profitability, but it
doesn’t seem as if they’ve had significant manufacturing cost increases. What dynamics are playing into this
inflationary shift with so many companies taking advantage of the chance to pass on price increases?
MM: I think, to me, you’ve got to look a little broader than what’s going on just this year, but you have to
include what happened last year. A lot of those companies you mentioned didn’t have record years last year,
and in fact, probably lost quite a bit of money last year. In a commodity market you run in cycles, so you have
bad years, you have good years, and in this case, some of the companies are having a good year this year, but
they didn’t have a good year last year. Over time, it kind of levels off and you get a relatively low margin over
time. They are able to push through price increases easier this year. I would say the other part of this is you’ve
got a lot of food that moves through food service, and there’s been menu inflation. Restaurants, they’ve seen a
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lot of cost increases as well, whether it’s labour, raw materials, all the things they had to do with COVID
restrictions, they’ve got less people moving through restaurants, so they’ve had to raise prices. We’ve had a lot
of those disruptions too that it’s not just been on the processing side, it’s been on the end-user food service
retailer side as well. I think on the dairy side, I would say a lot of dairy processors are having a pretty good
year, some may be having better years than others, but part of that is a lot of these companies, like the ones
you mentioned, the Cargills, ADMs, Tysons, they didn’t really have a lot of ability to pass through any price
increases or cost increases last year because of what was happening in the overall economy and demand, and
so forth. They’ve saved that up, and then this year, as things really got rolling again… it’s one thing to have
your costs up a couple of percent, you could maybe do some work and mitigate that, but if your costs are up
10% or packaging costs are up 30%, there’s not enough you can do internally to offset that, those cost increases
have to be pushed forward.
[00:47:25]
Q: Where is there notable global demand for the different categories we’ve discussed? You touched on exports
earlier.
MM: I would say, in general, the post-COVID recovery in the US has been similar directionally around the
world. Different countries are at different speeds around that. I was talking to a company this morning in
Europe, they’re seeing Southeast Asia recovering pretty strongly right now, and that’s a big dairy-consuming,
dairy-importing region. Not so much, or I’d say hardly at all, around fluid milk, but what trades globally is
more storable products like milk powder and whey products, and really not even cheese and butter, those
really don’t even trade that much either. In terms of what we have been talking about, trade is pretty minimal.
US fluid milk exports are minimal, there’s virtually no yoghurt exported, ice cream is really tiny volumes.
Cheese would be the biggest one, and even butter, butter is one of the least traded ag commodities in the
world, so there’s very little of that traded either.
When we talk about milk powder, lactose, whey powders, 50%, 60%, 70% or more of US production is
exported. If we talk about cheese and butter, it’s a domestic market, if we talk about milk powders and whey
products, it’s more what’s happening in the global market. The big producers of milk and dairy products are
Europe, and European milk production and dairy product production has been down, and New Zealand and
Australia, particularly New Zealand, and their milk production has been down to start their season. You’ve got
a tighter global market in terms of supply. Chinese demand continues to be very strong, along with recovering
demand in other countries and regions. European cheese prices are at a four-year high, milk powder prices in
the US are at a seven-year high, (audio distorts 49.33) products, record-high prices on whey proteins right
now, and a lot of those things are just driven by what’s going on in the overall global market, between tighter
supply, increasing demand, oil prices being high. A number of big, dairy importing countries are big oil
exporters, like Algeria, Indonesia and Mexico, and as they get more money from oil, they have more money to
spend on stuff, meaning food for feeding programmes for the people.
[00:50:09]
Q: How hard is it to get the products outside of the US? You highlighted the port issues and I know the US is
experiencing some import challenges. Are container shipping costs still up 100% and 200%?
MM: 300%, 400%, it’s very difficult. One company, they buy a product out of the US and ship it to Southeast
Asia, and they normally figure 30 days. They told me in the last month that it’s 80-90 days. One of the big milk
powder exporters told me last week that the back-ups right now are worse than what they were back in the
spring and will likely stay, a lot of challenges out into next year. Stuff is moving. Actually, in fact, US dairy
exports over the last six months or more, from a total volume standpoint, have been at or near record high
levels, and you think how much better could it be if we didn’t have all the issues with the supply chain? One of
the good features of the US export market is the biggest customer is Mexico, and that can just be put on a truck
or a rail to go into Mexico, it doesn’t have to go on a ship. If you’re going to Asia or you’re going to the Middle
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East, then it has to go on a ship and that’s where we’re seeing the delays. You’ve probably seen, and I just saw
this in the last week or so, 70% of the freight boxes, the freight containers, heading back to Asia or China are
empty. The ships aren’t hanging around here to load up full containers. If you can get an empty container and
load it up with milk powder or whatever, can you even get it onto a ship? In some cases, the stuff is just sitting
in warehouses for a couple of months to be able to get loaded into a box and put on a ship to ship out.
[00:52:16]
Q: What are some considerations around the domestic product in the US for institutions such as hospitals and
schools? How have demand and volume trended given the substantial up and down from kids going back to
school, mask or no mask mandates and so on?
MM: It’s that institutional segment, schools, hospitals, military, what have you. Schools are a huge deal for
fluid milk. Roughly 7% or 8% of all fluid milk consumed or sold in the United States goes through schools. A
year ago, when half the schools are not in person, you’ve lost 4% of fluid milk consumption right there, so
that’s a huge deal. With schools being back in session here this fall, you’ve been able to recover that, and in
fact, what I’m being told by some of the people that (audio distorts 53.45-48) the expansion of free school
meals – not only school lunch, but breakfast to basically everybody – has actually seen an increase in sales into
schools. Whether that sticks, we’ll see, but it looks like the increased availability of free lunch and free milk in
schools has increased the demand there, so that’s been a positive. I think it’s a little shift away from retail, but
I think that’s a positive story overall. It’s a big deal for milk. That segment, the institutional segment, isn’t that
big of a deal for cheese, for butter and yoghurt, it is a big deal for cheese because of the amount of mozzarella
cheese, and things like that, that go on pizzas and goes into school lunches as well. The schools are the big
piece of that. The hospitals, the military is not as big of a deal.
[00:54:33]
Q: Who is dominating the institutional segment? Is it the private label manufacturers?
MM: It’s not necessarily a branded product, it’s a bulk wholesale product. In milk, it’s the same plants that are
doing branded products, like a Dairy Farmers of America, what used to be Dean Foods, Prairie Farms, the
companies that have the fluid milk bottling assets, a portion of their sales are for the school lunch. It’s not a
terribly lucrative business by any means, so some companies don’t pursue it. When you get to cheese, there are
some of the secondary manufacturers that are in the processing that target that school market. Again, I would
say a number of the big players, the big companies in the cheese space don’t mess with it at all, and it tends to
be more of the mid-sized, the smaller companies that make that school milk and school cheese, and so forth.
That’s a little more of their core business, where the big companies don’t mess with it. The government is a
pain to deal with. You’ve got to be approved as an approved supplier, you’ve got to go through the process to
do all that, you go through the bidding process, it takes a while to get paid and some companies just don’t want
to deal with it.
[00:56:06]
NH: We’re just about out of time, but let me close by saying thank you, Mike, for your time today. We covered
an extensive amount in great detail, so I really appreciate that. Thank you, clients, for joining Third Bridge
Forum’s Interview. If you would like to speak to Mike in a private call or meeting, please let your relationship
manager know. Have a good one.
MM: Thank you.
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Transcription ends at 00:56:21 of the recorded material
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