Are Minnesotans who shop at certain grocery stores paying a steep mark-up for essentially the same milk they could buy more cheaply at other stores?
Last week, Bluesky user Casey Common posted on his favorite microblogging platform that the milk from Costco, Target, and Cub Foods was all from the same bottling plant operated by Kemps in north Minneapolis on West Broadway.
Your intrepid pseudo-journalist was determined to get to the bottom of this, and so on Saturday, October 25, I shopped at the following ALDI, Cub Foods, Hy-Vee, Target, and Trader Joe’s locations:
- ALDI, 1311 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55404
- Cub Foods, 1540 New Brighton Blvd., Minneapolis, MN 55413
- Hy-Vee, 3505 Bottineau Blvd., Robbinsdale, MN 55422
- Target, 1650 New Brighton Blvd., Minneapolis, MN 55413
- Trader Joe’s, 721 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55415
At these locations, we found the following brands of milk:
- ALDI Friendly Farms
- Cub Foods store brand
- Hy-Vee store brand
- Hy-Vee That’s Smart!
- Target Good & Gather
- Kemps Select
- Trader Joe’s store brand
As Common’s post explained, next to the sell-by date on your gallon of milk are certain codes that you can use to decipher where your milk was bottled. In the case of our milk in question, the bottling plant code is 27-168. The first number, “27” refers to the state of Minnesota, where the Kemps Minneapolis plant is located. In the case of Trader Joe’s, their milk has a code starting with 55 for the state of Wisconsin (Kemps in Cedarburg, WI), who are very proud of their dairy heritage.
The Food & Drug Administration has a complete list of bottling state codes online. Additionally, the Virginia State Dairymen's Association has a helpful website where bottling plant codes are referenced against the FDA data in an easy lookup tool. ALDI, Cub Foods, Hy-Vee, Target, and Kemps Select in Minneapolis stores all originate from the same bottling plant, 27-168: that's Kemps on West Broadway in north Minneapolis.
Focusing on just the milk from the Kemps Minneapolis bottling plant, the prices for a gallon of whole milk vary widely from store to store and brand to brand. Going back to our list, here are the prices of those gallons of whole milk at each store:
- ALDI Friendly Farms: $2.16
- Cub Foods store brand: $3.39
- Hy-Vee store brand: $3.99
- Hy-Vee That’s Smart!: $2.61
- Target Good & Gather: $3.59
- Kemps Select at Cub Foods: $4.79
- Kemps Select at Hy-Vee: $4.95
Looking back at our gallons of milk, all of the nutrition numbers are the same, and there is no artificial growth hormones, consistent with Kemps Select Whole Milk. All Kemps Minneapolis bottling plant whole milk has 150 calories per serving, and exactly equal numbers for sugar, protein, salt, Vitamin D, and other nutrients. Could it be that all the milk was like Duff’s, and coming from the same exact source?
Here are the complete codes for each milk we looked at:
NOV 10 02:10 27-168 FED 4 JP
NOV 12 27-168 15:08 FED 3 CH
NOV 13 27-168 23:51 FED 3 EJJ
NOV 12 27-168 18:58 FED 2 NH
NOV 12 27-168 00:50 FED 3 A6
We called up the Kemps customer hotline on Monday, October 27, for the skinny on milk codes. The short answer is that, “the milk itself is not different.” There is an expiration date, as we know and love, then the bottling plant in Minneapolis, then the 24-hour time that the milk was filled, then the bottling filler machine that was used. The “2,” “3,” or “4” refers to the filler bottling equipment used so that quality control can track back if there is an issue. The last few letters like, “JP” or “CH” are actually the operators’ initials. So you have a little signature on your milk from the Kemps operator who filled your gallon of milk.
So yes, this is just like Duff, Duff Lite, and Duff Dry, coming from the same source.
The milk in a gallon of Kemps Select is exactly the same milk from the same farms from the same cows as the milk from Friendly Farms—and it's available at ALDI for less than half the price.
