Fresh look at ‘raw milk’ sales

A lot of former raw milk suppliers have dropped out because it is hard to make such a niche product pay for itself through local deliveries, farmgate sales and farmers’ markets – which is what the law was framed to allow in England and Wales.

But there are many enthusiasts who say the milk is healthier and tastier than the standard product.

As previously reported in the Yorkshire Post, a milk dispensing machine in Selfridge’s of Oxford Street, London, has been doing a booming trade in milk from a certificated raw milk producer in Sussex, who employs his own staff to maintain it.

And the same producer, Steve Hook, is delivering over the rest of Britain – including Scotland, where raw milk cannot usually be sold at all – in packs ordered over the internet and sent by courier.

Mr Hook says the law was framed before these methods of sale were envisaged and there is nothing to stop him, as long as he is supplying the milk directly from his own farm, which has met all the hygiene requirements.

This week, the Food Standards Agency announced that its board “will decide, at its next meeting, whether the FSA should review the current rules governing the sale and marketing of unpasteurised, or raw, drinking milk and cream”.

The FSA announcement said: “This follows developments which have seen producers using new routes of sale for their products, such as the internet and vending machines.”

The FSA board will meet on Tuesday. If it does not stop the trade, other farmers and other outlets are likely to take advantage of the same loopholes.

The vending machine in Selfridge’s comes from Italy, where they are widely used to dispense raw milk. The same system has taken off in France, too.

Mr Hook and his father, Phil, run an organic herd of Holstein Friesians, with about 70 milking at a time, at Hailsham, Sussex, and deliver to Selfridges in a stainless steel tank which slots into the machine. Customers can buy a bottle to fill at a cost of £3.50 a litre or £2 for half a litre. The minimum mail-order delivery is six pints for £13.40 – from www.hookandson.co.uk/

Another website, www.campaignforrealmilk.co.uk, lists farms still offering local deliveries of raw milk.

Commenting on the FSA announcement this week, Mr Hook said: “Consumers want the choice. The whole issue of raw milk is temperature control and hygiene to mitigate the risks and that is taken care of whether you are selling from the farm or over the internet or through a vending machine, as long as the product is safe.”

Big milk processors claim to have no interest in the raw milk market, which is tiny in comparison with their volumes.

It would be almost impossible for them to get involved in raw milk supply anyway, with the law as it stands, because no intermediary between an individual farmer and the customers is allowed.

Jim Begg, director general of the processors’ representative body, Dairy UK, is a Scotsman who thinks the Scots have got it right by banning any trade at all in milk which has not been heated to kill off the possibility of TB and other illnesses which cows can transmit to humans.

Pasteurisation is the reason milk today will keep for so long.

In the old days, it sometimes went off in a day in hot weather.

But Mr Hook says his will keep for a week if delivered in an insulated pack and then put straight into a fridge.