Coles Facebook Page admits that their fresh milk is made from reconstituted milk powder

Ok, firstly, I call bullshit.

This is likely either incorrect or outright fake. Firstly, it would cost more to make bottled milk from reconstituted milk. So what would the point of that be? It would take more work and more factory hours - dehydrating the milk, separating the solids, re-mixing it with exactly the right amount of water so it all tastes identical. It just isn't financially viable.

Also, what social media is also struggling to grasp here is the overwhelming majority of the bottled milk in this country is made by two companies: Lion and Parmalat. They own most bottled milk brands and aside from slight water-content variations (and - to a larger extent - the placebo effect acting on your own imagination to make you think "branded milk" tastes better. And yes, this is very possible - experiments show you can fill a whole bunch of different cups with tap water and get an identical "wow this tastes so different/worse/better" effect if you tell people they are different brands, with the more expensive "brands" tasting "better"). Pauls, Pura, Dairy Farmers, Coles Milk, Woolworths Milk, Canberra Milk, numerous others - it is literally all the fucking same milk. The same low farm gate price is paid to farmers, then the milk duopoly do not segregate the milk. It all goes into vats. It all gets bottled into branded plastic bottles. It is all indistinguishable. There is zero benefit in the idea of converting any of it to powder to reconstitute later unless you intend to ship it overseas.

For non-bottled milks, two other main companies own almost everything else. Murray Goulburn and Fonterra are duopoly responsible for the recent price slashing (due to their investment losses they've cut their pay for farmers by up to 20%). The overwhelming majority of supermarket brands you see in other dairy products - yoghurts, creams, butters, cheeses etc (Western Star, Dairy Farmers, Farmers Union, Yoplait, Fruche, Bega Cheese, Coles and Woolworths' own brands, a whole swathe of smaller brands, in fact just about all of it) are produced by this other duopoly.

So "avoiding Coles/Woolworths" dairy is a nice idea on the one hand, but if you're buying pretty much other major supermarket brands absolutely no extra money is going to farmers. And yeah sure, maybe they'll get "the consumer message" that everyone wants to pay more all of a sudden, but I doubt much if any of these profits will be passed to farmers for two simple reasons: 1. the price of milk has almost no legislatory control and 2. the vast, vast majority of dairy products are produced by these companies so the farmers have no choice but to sell to them. You're simply giving more profits and market control to the milk duopoly - and even if they throw the farmers a few more cents, they'll be free to take that away again because they can.

The only way to "give more money to farmers" (and more importantly, security) is to avoid the main milk brands altogether. Do not buy your dairy from them. Or buy independent branded dairy made by small producers instead of massive foreign conglomerates. Some of these are sold in big supermarkets. e.g. Bulla, Jalna, these examples of local brands sometimes sold at big supermarkets etc. Or buy from farmers markets or farmers co-ops like Aussie Farmers Direct. However, if you're just switching to brands like Pauls or Pura, you're not giving extra money to

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