Seth Bahler built a construction and fencing business from scratch, and then left it behind to take the reins of a 130-year-old family dairy he once had zero interest in running. Today he is CEO of Oakridge Dairy in Ellington, Connecticut, one of the largest single-site dairies in New England, and the founder of Moozy, the first fresh cold-chain milk in an aluminum can.
A Fifth-Generation Dairy Farm With a Startup Mindset
“I guess out of the challenges that I saw maybe inspired me to think, hey, we could make this better,” Seth shared. That same entrepreneurial instinct that pushed him out of the family business in the first place is exactly what brought him back.
After separating ownership from management, upgrading infrastructure, and building a state-of-the-art 3,000-cow facility in 2017, Oakridge has become one of the largest single-site dairies in New England.
Yet the transition did not go smoothly. Seth called the move-in “a train wreck.” Milk prices were low, production struggled, and the business took years to recover. That difficult stretch is what made the eventual pivot toward brand building feel urgent rather than optional.
Building a Brand: Modern Milkman to Moozy
Recovery came through a home delivery concept called Modern Milkman, launched in 2019 with glass bottles and 300 customers. COVID-19 pushed that to 3,000 customers almost overnight. A 2024 merger with a UK counterpart delivering 250,000 orders a week funded Oakridge’s own bottling plant, and that plant unlocked Moozy.
The idea clicked after Seth tried canned water. “I drank my first Liquid Death and saw what they did with water and thought, we could do this with milk.”
A grant from the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center and a partnership with Dairy Management Inc. turned the concept into a product and opened the door to launch at Expo West.
Equipment arrived two weeks before the Expo West deadline. The first sample batch shipped to California with less than a week of production experience behind it. That push paid off. Buyers loved it.
Why Fresh Canned Milk Is a Different Category
Moozy is not shelf-stable retort milk. It is a cold-chain, fresh-pasteurized product in flavors like chocolate, strawberry, horchata, and coffee milk.
“We really want to focus on flavor first, really good tasting milk fresh from the farm,” Seth said. That distinction sets it apart from protein drinks and meal replacements that currently dominate the dairy-in-a-can space.
Targeting the Next Generation of Dairy Consumers
With the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act now passed and whole milk returning to schools, Moozy is entering the market at the right time. Oakridge is working with UConn marketing students to connect with Gen Z consumers who, as Seth puts it, “want something real.”
The brand is available in the Northeast and in conversations with national distributors, but the bigger vision is clear: make fresh milk cool again for the next generation, and keep a 130-year-old farm running for 50 more.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries.
Today’s guest is Seth Bahler. He’s the CEO at Oakridge Dairy based in Ellington, Connecticut. He’s fifth generation on the farm. They’ve been around for around 130 years and they are the largest single site in New England, largest single dairy site in New England.
They just launched Moozy, which is a canned fresh milk line of products in fresh flavors like chocolate, strawberry, horchata, coffee milk, and others.
For anybody who’s watching the episode here, I’ve got a can of the fresh coffee milk if you want to see what that looks like, but you can also look them up online and visit their website, follow them on all the socials.
I visited Oakridge Farm a few weeks ago. It’s a gorgeous operation with a methane digester. They have a milking rotary, a creamery and so much more. It’s always so interesting and inspiring to me to see farms who are bringing themselves forward into the future.
And Oakridge clearly has a vision on setting themselves up for success to be around for another 50 years and more, I’m sure, based on what they’re setting up. They take excellent care of their cows as well, many of which are A2A2 milk cows.
We talk about that a little bit in the episode, as well as many of the things that they’re doing to be the farm of the future. Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Hey, Seth, how are you? Thanks for joining me today. I’m so glad to have you on the show.
Seth Bahler: I’m great. Yes, thanks for having me.
Maureen: Awesome. So I always like to start with the background and history. I’m a big believer that the past informs the future, but especially for farmers, because there is this dichotomy or this balance of growing up on the farm and do you want to stay on the farm? So talk a little bit about your days as a youth leading up to the work you’re doing now.
Seth: Yes. So the office that I’m sitting in is the house that I grew up in. I’m a fifth generation farmer. My great great grandfather started the farm back in 1890. Grew up around it. Used to go to work with my dad at three in the morning and help milk cows on Saturdays. You know, I would go because the guy that was working at the time would bring donuts. So it’d be like, hey, get donuts on Saturday.
Yes, I grew up around it, but it was never a passion of mine. My dad actually was a partner with his two cousins and brothers on the farm. So there were four owners and two cousins and a brother. And at that time there was some dysfunction and they all got along, but they didn’t really ever talk about anything.
The business was kind of pretty stagnant, not a lot of reinvestment, a bit of frustration. So I saw my dad go through that and kind of shaped me to, hey, let’s find a different career path because this doesn’t look fun. My dad was an owner, but it wasn’t fun. And actually, I was in starting high school, he actually left and became a silent partner of the farm. So we still lived on the farm, but he wasn’t working there.
Maureen: Because it didn’t seem attractive, right?
Seth: And he went out and found another job for several years because he was just frustrated but didn’t really want to mess the business up. So he stepped aside and you know that that’s what that’s what my youth was growing up is seeing some dysfunction but it’s common in a family business and especially inheriting a business partner that’s your second cousin isn’t your brother anymore.
Over the generations, it’s been a challenge to stay aligned and. As a Bahler, we’re not great communicators at times, so sometimes that makes it hard to run a business together.
After growing up, I went to high school. I worked as I was going to get out of high school and go become a plumber and HVAC. My uncle owned a HVAC company. So I worked for them for about a year through high school and then out of high school, I was going to be an apprentice for plumbing and came to realize I’m like, I’m just I need to go do something myself.
I would say I have an entrepreneurial spirit and I’m like, I can go do something myself. My brother had his own landscaping lawn business and I’m like that looks like fun. He works hard but like it’s what he’s building is his so that the winter after high school graduation the next spring I started a construction and fencing business that I was 19 years old and started that the first year.
I actually cut my fingers off in a boating accident and got the rope wrapped around my fingers. So the first year I’m working with my hands and I was in a cast for about nine months because three of my fingers got cut off. But that was the first year.
But I guess that was a big shaping moment in my life of like, hey, like work for yourself. You got to figure it out. So ran that construction business and fencing business for around six years.
And I was at the point in my business, I had employees, had equipment, and I was looking to what is the next step in this business. I guess I sometimes get bored. So like, we’re doing projects, we’re doing commercials, doing fencing for tennis courts and guard rails and all that. But I was like, what’s the next step?
I did some research in manufacturing of like, Could I start manufacturing these products? And that was right around the time the bank told our family, like, hey, what is your succession plan? What are your next steps? And if you don’t have any plan, you either need to sell or figure it out.
So that’s right at the time when they reached, it was like six years into my business, I was around 23, they reached out to the next generation, which is 13 of us. One of them was working on the farm and there’s 13 that aren’t. I believe it’s 13. And they asked us, hey, do you have any interest? And personally, I said, no, I’m good. I have my own thing going on and don’t have any interest.
But somehow, God’s direction or however it went, I said, I’ll listen. And I guess out of the challenges that I saw maybe inspired me to think, hey, we could make this better. It’s probably that same spirit of entrepreneurialship. Like, hey, there’s a lot of opportunity there, but there’s a big mountain. And at that same time, I was approached by an individual that was interested in buying my company.
Maureen: Wow, talk about serendipity.
Seth: Yes, so I ended up selling my business and coming to work. I wrote my own job description. They’re working with a consulting firm on Next Generation and they said, you want to work here? What do you want to do?
I have some maintenance background because I had construction and I do enjoy business. So maybe I could do some on the business side and some on the maintenance side. And that’s where I started.
Maureen: Yes. And so you’re CEO now, how long did it take you to get there?
Seth: So I started in early spring of 2013. And by the fall time, they named me as general manager. And I really had no clue about the dairy industry, honestly. How I was named the general manager is I guess I had a lot of energy and came in and I had some business background so I kind of really put a lot of energy in there. Okay, let’s set some structure in place, let’s get some things in order, and then maintenance as well.
I came in and did maintenance and worked in the business. Those were the two weakest links so I gained a lot of credit from the employees because things started getting fixed and they saw energy. I was able to build a lot of rapport really quickly because hey, that gate’s been broken for the past year, let’s fix it.
So I got a lot of credit from every employee there. And then also the business side of there was a lot of things that were, the business was run in a way that a family farm ran through the 60s, 70s and 80s. And it needed some restructuring to make that do better.
I put my efforts in there and by the fall time, they named me as general manager and really gave me the reins. It was my uncle and my dad’s two cousins. My dad wasn’t involved at the time in the business.
At the end of 2013 they gave me the reins and I think that the biggest challenge that I saw besides the maintenance in the finance and business side was the ownership that was holding back the business. So I got to spend about two years in the business working on that ownership side.
Ownership and management are separate, they are not the same and we restructured and had to say to the owners that had been getting a salary from the farm, here’s your job, here’s your responsibilities, here’s what you’re accountable for, and here’s your salary that should reflect it.
At the time the farm was paying for the housing, the insurance, the food and all that, and we said, okay, here’s your budgets and stuff like that. That was honestly the biggest thing holding back the business. And that’s what I probably worked on for the first two years on, after we worked through some of the business day-to-day things.
We were at a high level working through how do we separate our ownership and management? Because that is what is going to keep us here long term and fortunately or unfortunately, had to make some really hard decisions.
I had to let family go, had to promote and demote, but thankfully the family was at a point where they didn’t have much energy left. They let me, as an unknown farmer, who had no background in farming except for living by it, make some decisions and hire the right people to get into management. And thankfully we had a really good year in 2014 that gave me some credit as well, which was great milk prices.
Maureen: Yes, I think leadership is partially about being able to be responsible enough to make the tough decisions.
I do think communication is a cornerstone of it too. You have to be able to communicate, right? You mentioned, Bahler’s are not very good at that. You’re going to like it or not, you’re going to have to figure that out, right? Everybody has to, along the way.
But I think the other is luck, right? And some of it is, for you in that story that you just told, some of it was serendipity and luck in terms of somebody coming to you about the construction business, just as this was falling into place, the great milk prices the first year that probably built trust and respect from the folks on the farm.
So when you came in, in 2013, and there was this conversation about succession, you mentioned that there were roughly 13 other family members, fifth generation, that were part of this discussion as well.
Did other folks come in? Because you’ve also since brought in outside partners as well, right? Which I think is more common now, but, as you referenced in the 70s and 80s, that didn’t used to happen then, right? It was just don’t, for the love of God, let anybody else in here. This is a family only operation.
Simplified two questions, who else came in when you came in and what have you evolved in terms of partnerships on the farm since then?
Seth: Yes, at that time I had one cousin here and one of my other cousins was hauling milk as a third party and myself. So I actually was the only one at the time that came in.
Over the years, others have come and gone. One of my brothers came to work here after college and did it for a year or two here and he wanted to start his own business. So he went in a different direction and we’ve had other cousins come along the way.
I do have one other cousin in the business. He is an amazing operator and he loves to operate and he wants to operate and he doesn’t want to be a manager.
I totally respect that. I think that’s how the business is, putting people in their sweet spot. So I do have one other cousin in the business.
We currently have about 60 employees. We have about 45 to 50 owners. 80% of the family, 80% of the business is family-owned, meaning the Bahler family.
And then we raised some outside capital when we did an expansion on the dairy in 2017. So we did raise some outside and I like to say 80% is owned by the family and the other 20 % is owned by my other family, from my wife’s family and other community people that understand our business that want to support us.
Really, I think it’s all family. I have every owner’s number and go out to lunch with most of them if they’re in town.
It’s not like it’s a Venture Capital (VC) business. It’s more people that want to see us succeed and invest in our future and leadership. I think they’re all family.
We just had an annual meeting. Over the years as an owner, the four Bahler owners, they’re still the major owners. But they know that I’m the CEO and we’re accountable to more than four owners, even though they own the majority.
There’s metrics or there’s like accountability in place for the owners on both sides. So it’s like, Hey, we’re running a business. We need to make sure that we’re all accountable. And I’m accountable. I can be replaced. So we need to do our job the best we possibly can.
Maureen: Yes, good for you. I think that a really fresh mindset and perspective that is hopefully inspiring to other dairies and other any type of farm operation across the US and the you know, North America and the world for that matter. I think it’s a great way to think about it.
So, Oakridge is the largest dairy farm in the northeast. And so first of all, Largest how? Talk about that a little bit.
And then secondly, I would love for you to talk a little bit about some of the innovations that are on the farm as well. The size and scale of the barns are massive. I was touring there a couple weeks ago, and they’re enormous.
It just reminds me I grew up on a dairy farm as well. And you know, my dad had one tiny barn that held maybe 50 head at once for milking and it’s cool to see at that size and scale. But so talk about things like the barns, the digester, the rotary, the creamery, the exciting stuff, but also like the scale of the operation.
Seth: Yes, so I wouldn’t say we’re the largest in the Northeast. We’re the largest in Connecticut, one of the largest in New England. New York is still in the Northeast, so there are some really large farms out in the Western part of New York.
So in New England, we’re one of the largest single sites. We have about seven acres under the roof for a cross ventilated barn. So we’re milking around 2,600 cows every day and then with dries and all that, we’re about 3,000 total head. It’s all under one roof and we built it in 2017.
I think stepping back like after we got the family structure in place, it’s like we have a lot of opportunities for a future, but our sites are very depreciated and where do we go from here?
Instead of investing millions of dollars in polishing something that can’t be polished, let’s build something new that can be here for another 50 years.
So we built the brand new facility in 2017. Throughout the years, we’ve invested into a lot of technology and innovation and have come up with partnerships. As you mentioned, a methane digester, we partnered with a utility company, developing a company that we have a methane digester. We have solar. You know, we’ve embraced technology.
Our vision is to be the farm of the future. And really, there’s a lot of aspects of that. And we can talk about that. Our goal is to be here for another 50 years.
And Connecticut is a very unique state, its high cost production. Land is a bit challenging. I think we have close to 70 fields that we rent. Our largest field. Yes, so we rent a lot of ground and we have a lot of smaller pieces. You farm 10 acres of land where people in the Midwest wouldn’t even touch that.
So we’re in a unique spot in Connecticut. But I think our cost reduction is higher. If we were to build a dairy in the state it wouldn’t be or sorry in the country again.
It probably wouldn’t be Connecticut, but I think the uniqueness of the 30 million people within 100 miles of us is where we see opportunity in the future. And thankfully we’ve had 130 years in this community.
The community embraces us and we have something special where we are milking cows 2000 feet from the center of town where the town hall, the police station, all that. We can read the high school scoreboard from our 20 million gallon manure lagoon.
It’s just a very unique space, but we feel like how do we take that to be our advantage? Because we can’t add another thousand cows or 2000 cows to our barn.
We can add some and we will over time, but the growth for us is really how do we build a brand and the pieces that we’ve been doing is, first, how do we make sure our cows are treated the best possible way? Because they’re the main engine of a dairy. So treating cows the best possible way, getting the best quality milk. So we’ve done a lot in that space and we produce over 100 pounds per cow every day.
Things are clicking very well on the dairy and over the past couple years we’ve been stepping into the building of the Oakridge brand as well as some other projects that we can speak on.
Maureen: Yes, let’s go there next. You recently launched Moozy. And so for anybody who’s watching, I have a can here. So fresh canned milk. Talk a little bit about why you launched that and how that’s part of your innovation plan into the future.
Seth: Yes, maybe I can step out for like two minutes and talk a bit about how we got there. So 2017, we built a brand new dairy, moved into it thinking we’re going to be moving in our two 60 year old sites. We’re going to move into a brand new site and everything’s going to go great.
Honestly, it was a train wreck, made a lot of bad decisions and moved in and like it was complete chaos.
Maureen: Bad decisions and it didn’t go well, because of the way it was produced?
Seth: It didn’t go well for the company. Not just bad decisions, but inexperience. So we moved everything over. We built this brand new barn and we were so burnt out of construction.
We can [general contract] this millions of millions of dollars of projects and we were running the day to day and then all of a sudden, hey, let’s move the cows over and… Just maybe a bit of inexperience and we learned a lot . Maybe we would build another dairy just so we could do it better again. But it kind of set us back and at that time, 2017, 2018, it was really hard.
Milk prices were not good. Our production was not good and it made it really challenging.
But at the same time, how do we get some glimmers of hope? This is just going to be a grind. You can’t change a dairy overnight, it takes time and investing in the cows and really like it’s going to take several years to really get this thing moving.
But how do we take steps into building a brand? In 2028, we were like, hey, let’s explore some different ways to at least get our feet wet in there because we know this is going to be a grind.
We don’t have a ton of money to invest into any products, but we need to get something started. We explored, let’s just get some of our milk bottled and put a little fridge out on our steps or whatever, just to get our feet wet and come up with the concept of, hey people are getting home delivery. We could take a blast from the past of the whole milkman and put some modern technology to bring back the milkman.
We built a website called the Modern Milkman where it was a home delivery. We took milk from our farm, brought it to a farm up the street. It was about 20 minutes from us, and we bottled it in glass bottles. And we did glass because that was the way people remember the Milkman, but also that was the only plant that would allow us to do it. So we had to do glass.
Maureen: So Seth, prior to that, were you not bottling anything? Like, were you just selling into a co-op?
Seth: No, we were not bottling anything. Yes, selling into a co-op. We did have a partnership years ago with Stew Leonard’s that we would be their supplier, but we were just selling commodity milk.
So it’s like, how do we explore it? So we started bottling at this farm. We’d bottle a couple of cases on a Monday, come back to the farm. One of the older milk rooms that we had put some insulation in and made it into a small walk-in cooler.
So we built a website called the Modern Milkman. People could order online and we deliver it throughout the week. So that was our kickstart into building a brand that was through 2019 and by 2019 we had about 300 customers.
It was really just a good way to connect with the community and build a good reputation for the farm. And then 2020 hit and we went from 300 customers to 3000 customers with COVID and it springboarded our business and it gave us the ability to get our brand and name out there. Still under that Modern Milkman brand.
Now we’re renting the plant three or four days a week that that guy so nicely let us use. And we were delivering, we were hiring anybody that even could drive or maybe they even didn’t know how to drive, we’d hire them just to do deliveries. And COVID was crazy, but it was a springboard for us to get our name out there. And we were able to hold on to a lot of those customers through 21, 22, 23.
At that same time, when we started in 2019, there was another Modern Milkman started in the UK. We were modernmilkman.com. There was modernmilkman.co.uk.
Same concept, same returnable packaging was their focus. And they started in the UK and we would get confused sometimes with someone reaching out on social media, you dropped off the wrong milk or you hit my vehicle or something like that.
We ended up connecting through social media and the CEO and I ended up talking every couple months. Hey, how’s it going over in the UK? This is the same name. We just connected through the names.
COVID, they exploded. They ended up, the first year they got up to 9,000 customers and then COVID, they got up to like 100,000 customers. Their concept is a little bit different, but currently they’re delivering to about 250,000 deliveries a week. They have about 500 trucks on the road in the UK.
I bring that in saying we have the same name, same concept, and we ended up talking. They have the technology that can scale. They have the sales arm and the understanding. So, in 2023, we started talking about, how do we do the same thing they did in the UK with 200,000 deliveries a week, getting fresh milk? How do we do that same thing in the US?
We ended up merging our businesses in 2024 and that would be merging the last mile, the customers. That wouldn’t be the bottling plant. That would be the customers in the sales arm.
So in technology, we were really good at producing milk and bottling. They’re really good at selling and delivering, so we merged together there. That’s another luck, fate, however that worked, but very aligned in a lot of things, same language.
A lot of their executive team have moved to the US now. But it was the ability to grow that has given us the ability to build our own bottling plant, which we did in 2024. So we built a bottling plant. We own and operate that in supply milk to the Modern Milkman, the home delivery side.
That has also given us the ability to control quality and every aspect of it grows. We were renting that little family farm to bottle our milk and we couldn’t do anything extra.
So we’ve since built our own bottling. That has given us the ability to expand and do innovation and play around with new products as well as come up with projects like the Moozy brand that we just launched.
Our goal is, we really want to be known as the premium milk in the Northeast. That’s our vision, our target is to be the number one brand for premium milk. And we’ve really been focused on that through the Modern Milk Man, but also in other channels in getting into higher end retail channels, getting on store shelves and that type of stuff.
Stepping over to Moozy, at about the end of 2024, we were looking at different ways that we can continue to grow the milk through the plant. The bottling plant we have is about a mile away from the dairy. It’s north of the dairy.
And then our co-op that we send our milk to is south of the dairy. Every load that goes north, we get paid more money for. So, how do we get more of our milk north as our goal? Milk going south is paid as a commodity and it’s harder to do. So how do we do that and build a brand?
Maureen: And just out of curiosity, with the milk that’s going south into the co-op, your cows are all A2A2 milk cows. So do you have any sort of premium when it goes into the co-op or is it like, do they treat it differently or is it just milk? Is it treated the same as the farmer down the street?
Seth: No. Actually the way we do it is we have four or five pens in our barn that are A2A2 cows only. So we segregate those and then we milk them separately on the days we need milk for our creamery. Or we need milk to the north. We milk those in a separate tank. But then everything else that goes to the co-op is not A2A2 specific, but we’ve been breeding for A2.
Maureen: Got it. And why is that?
Seth: Just because we tested our whole herd and we got about 65% of our herd being A2A2.
So we can’t claim it 100%. So we just want our milk to be A2A2 in our bottles, but we don’t have enough. And there’s really no premium in our area because there’s nobody requiring A2A2, although it’s becoming more and more a big thing, more well-known in America now.
Maureen: Yes. So the Modern Milkman acquisition partnership, the merging in 2024 allowed you to build the bottling plant and bring that in-house, which, as you mentioned, allowed you to have an opportunity to elevate and innovate, which brought you Moozy.
And so talk a little bit about the brand development there, because not only were you able to secure some grants to help underwrite building that brand, but you also had some really great partnerships with some behemoths like DMI. So talk about that a little bit.
Seth: Yes, I think a couple different things happened in a short window. I drank my first Liquid Death and saw what they did with water and thought, we could do this with milk. Like, why don’t we do this with milk?
At that same timeframe, I got to know Paul over at DMI and he’s been on the innovation team and futures team. And he sent me over a slide deck of a hundred ideas that they’ve come up with. Concepts. And one of those was canned milk. I’m like, that is really cool.
And then, at that same time, I was talking to somebody that does a lot of milk in schools and they have cardboard school milk. They were complaining about how packaging is hard and they measure their success in how many leakers they have. Every week they’ve got cardboard leaking and the bad experience it gives schools and wondering, why don’t they do it in a can?
So I think that’s what inspired the idea, a few things happening. So we ended up coming up with a concept of like, hey, let’s get milk in an aluminum can, we can make milk cool. Like, how do we do that?
So we submitted a grant through Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center at the end of 2024. We thought, if we get it, well, let’s explore it more. But it took a couple months to see if we were awarded that grant. And in that time, I did some more and more research and things came up and it’s like, hey, we really need to consider doing this if we get the grant or not.
A couple months later, we did hear back saying, hey, you were awarded this grant to build some equipment or put some equipment in to try to figure this out. So we’re a grade A IMS milk plant. So it’s just a pasteurized plant.
And honestly, fresh milk has never been put into an aluminum can before. So over the last year, we’ve been working on, how do we get this done?
We partnered with our Department of Ag who regulate the milk plants in Connecticut, as well as Brie on our team who worked for the Department of Ag and has been trained through FDA. So we’ve had some connections with the FDA on, how do we do this?
And over the past year, we’ve been really exploring and designing and building our canning project. So from an operations standpoint, we bought an old can filler that was from an athletic brewing company that did non-alcoholic beer. We took that and then totally revamped it and made it with all three compliance valves.
We did a ton of work on the operation side over the past year. Alongside that we worked on the branding side. Early on it’s like hey how do we brand this. What do we do?
A couple of thoughts were, let’s just put an Oakridge logo on it and put it on shelves. At that, I saw more opportunity glass bottle milk is very, I’d see a Northeast regional thing for Oakridge.
But how do we get beyond that into a national presence? Cans could be our avenue. So we worked and searched around and talked with two marketing agencies and ended up going with Freshmade, which is a branding agency out of Florida. We came to them with the concept of, we want to get milk in the aluminum cans and we want to make it cool for the next generation.
We have really good tasting milk. We see milk as a beverage that people have kind of gone away from. But the taste and the flavors that we make, the whole milk with chocolate and coffee and strawberry and the flavors that we do, it’s really good tasting.
And I think we could put that up against any beverage and we will win from a soda or from an indulgent standpoint. So we went to Freshmade with the concept of we don’t have a name, we want to do this, we got a grant. Let’s design something that’s really innovative.
We engaged with them as well as with DMI and DMI has worked alongside us. We talked with Paul and his team on the innovation and before we engaged with Freshmade. They came up with some naming ideas and stuff like that.
But then Freshmade took it and ran and we landed on Moozy, landed on the premium field. The good taste, the packaging. And then DMI was working alongside us doing consumer testing and they you know being part of the project and consumer testing. They invited us to go to Expo West with them to launch this product in the spring.
Maureen: Which is basically for, anybody who’s not familiar, is essentially the Super Bowl of food shows.
Seth: Yes, so that was really cool. At the end of last year, they said, we’ve been part of this Moozy project. We see a lot of opportunities. Could you be part of our booth at Expo West? And we said, absolutely.
We didn’t have any milk in a can. We didn’t have the equipment even finalized. But that gave us a deadline that we needed by February 22nd. We needed to ship milk to California and honestly, we got the equipment in two weeks before testing and working through that.
We made our first sample batch that we sent to California on the 21st and it got on a truck the next day and we never even had a week of experience in it. So we’re like, we hope it tastes good in a week. We did some internal testing, but we filled the can with our filler and all that. So we wanted to make sure.
So we sent it to expo West and it was a huge success. We had huge buyers coming to our booth and saying, this is amazing. We love your innovation. We love the packaging. We love the taste and how do we access this?
So I think that was about two months ago and we made our first for-sale batch about two weeks ago. So we had about another month to get everything dialed in and get final approvals. And we made our first for sale batch about two weeks ago and it’s starting to hit shelves now.
So yes, we’ll see where that goes. But we’ve engaged with a great agency partner (Agency 29) the past couple of weeks and we want to really take this brand and really grow it with a national presence, but really focused on the Northeast right now. We have some self-distribution through Oakridge, so we’ve got it in all that.
We’ve worked with partners like Stew Leonard’s, we got it on their shelves as well as we have a small distributor that we’ve worked with in the past for Modern Milkman that distributes lunch meats and chips and stuff like that. And they’re distributing it locally and have some early stage sales for us.
But where we go from here is we’re talking with some national distributors as well as some national chains to see how we can get this national. But we also want to do it right. We’re also doing shelf life studies. This is a refrigerated product. There’s a lot to work through.
Maureen: Right, yes. I want to go back, too, to something that you said that fresh milk has never been put in a can before, just to clarify the difference between something like there is another product that is in a can that is milk, but it’s not fresh, right?
That is retort produced and I don’t want to knock anybody, so I won’t mention their brand name, but there are similar products out there from the consumer lens, but in your perspective, it’s wildly different because what you’re doing is putting it fresh in the can.
It’s a cold chain all the way through. And so it has a very different flavor profile and freshness to it because of the way that you’re producing it.
Seth: Yes, absolutely. There are a few products out there in retort. Retort is pasteurizing it in the can, which you have to heat it up and pressurize it. And it does change the flavor profile. And our brand, Moozy, we really want to focus on flavor first, really good tasting milk fresh from the farm.
So branding it around that as well as the three, three or four companies that have milk in a can are in the protein space. Really, protein drinks, meal replacement, that type of stuff.
And I put that in a separate category. Meal replacement protein drinks are different from the fresh milk category, good tasting chocolate milk is in a different category of itself. There is dairy in cans, but I don’t believe we’re first if it’s kind of an IMS plant getting dairy in a can.
Maureen: Yes, and also very different in another sense too, which is you are all in with this product on what you said, to make it cool for the next generation. So really intentionally branding and marketing this to Gen Z, Gen Alpha, that care about that sort of thing.
For many years and still, there’s been a lot of discussion about millennials a bit and a lot of Gen Z really caring about the mission driven, the sustainability, the story behind the brand.
Liquid Death is an excellent example of brand winning and the story behind the brand winning in a category to allow vast differentiation thanks to brand building efforts.
I think that we at Agency 29 are very excited to work with you guys on Moozy for that reason, because not only does it have innovation and differentiation in terms of how you’re producing it in terms of retort versus fresh milk production.
But also this angle of we’re all in on building something for younger generations and let’s see what kind of an impact that can make not only for Moozy and Moozy’s traction, but also to get Gen Z, Gen Alpha drinking more milk.
And so as we wind down here, the last couple of minutes of our discussion, the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act just recently passed, which allows whole milk to be brought back into schools. It’s theorized that one of the reasons why Gen Z in particular and a bit of millennials stopped drinking a lot of milk is because it was primarily skimmed milk in schools, which has a very different taste profile than whole milk, right?
So I just think that this is kind of the perfect storm of all of these things happening at the same time where schools are welcoming whole milk back into the schools as an option for younger students, but Moozy being well positioned and well timed.
And honestly, from the stories that you tell here, Seth, you should play the lottery because you’re a very lucky person. And I don’t mean to say that that’s the essence of this.
It is a lot of your hard work lining up with recognizing the opportunity to be able to lean into the opportunities that are in front of you into the right place, right time sort of thing. But it just seems like all of this is lining up.
So talk a little bit about your thoughts in terms of sort of what’s next for the generation and milk consumption and kind of the future of dairy.
Seth: For Moozy, we’ve designed this to go after Gen Z. And I think if you step back 20 years ago, milk has been consumed at the kitchen table in a glass alongside your spaghetti at night. Well, over the past 20 years, that moment doesn’t happen as much. And it’s a lot of grab and go that type of stuff now.
As well as if you walk past the dairy case, there has been a lack of innovation in that dairy case over the last 20 years. The number one brand that’s selling is the store brand, gallon milk. And I think that has a bit hurt our industry.
There is a lot more going into it now, but I feel like a lot of other beverages have outpaced the dairy industry because milk is milk. And we’ve seen a decline over the last 20 years.
At the same time, over the past, we’ve been bottling for seven, eight years. And when we first started, whole milk was about 30% of our sales. Now it’s probably 70% of our sales.
So I’ve seen it in the past seven, eight years that we’ve been bottling. Everybody’s interested in whole milk. We’re seeing it get back in schools. It has a lot of flavor. It has healthy fats and people are realizing the benefits of the fats, the proteins and its real taste.
I think it’s coming back and then our goal is to target that by bringing some innovation in there, make some new ways to consume it. The grab and go and focused on telling that farm story in that it’s coming directly from the farm, getting out to the shelves so the younger generation can feel a part of that journey they want.
They want something real. We’re working with the two classes at UConn marketing and we’re hearing that students want real food. They want to know the story. They’re going to try. They care, from a sustainability standpoint, about what goes into producing that food and they’re more educated.
And our goal is to try to fit in that space. We don’t have it all figured out. We’re still really new at this side of it. So I don’t know, getting lucky, maybe we’ll talk in a year and nothing will happen, but I’m really hopeful at how we tap into this next generation of consumers, while also giving them a really good tasting product that they can enjoy in a different landscape.
We see alcohol and all that is actually declining and other beverages are increasing. Rather than going out and getting drunk at the bar, maybe there’ll be milk bars or milk drunks, I don’t know.
Maureen: Yes, that’s awesome. Well, and you’ve got your vision and your priorities could not be more aligned with your focus on a great tasting product, everything that you’re talking about in terms of building the next gen farm of the future and how you’ve been able to bring innovation into the farm operation from the barn to the canning line, digester solar all around.
I’m sure that a year from now you will continue to go far and 50 years from now we’ll have to do another episode here to see what the update is at that point.
Thank you so much for joining me today and telling the story of yourself and the farm and the continued growth of the innovation over there. I am really excited about the future of Oakridge and Moozy in particular. Thanks for taking the time.