Thanks to Marshfield Bottling Plant, Local School Kids Are Able to Drink Fresh Milk

Thursday, October 5th, 2023 -- 2:01 PM

(Jan Shepel, Correspondent, Wisconsin State Farmer) Thanks to a Marshfield bottling plant, nearly 10,000 kids in Wood, Clark and Marathon counties are able to drink fresh milk packed in plastic pouches.

According to Jan Shepel a Correspondent with the Wisconsin State Farmer, that wasn't the case a year ago when many Midwestern school districts were having trouble finding half-pints of milk to use in their nutrition programs.

The shortage of the familiar milk cartons was due to Borden-Select having shuttered two plants, one in Illinois and one in Wisconsin, leaving schools that depended on them for milk supplies scrambling.

Many schools had contracts with the two Borden-Select plants and school nutrition staffers had difficulty finding the half-pint containers of milk that school children consume every day. Supplies of small cartons of milk had to come from as far away as Minnesota or Iowa or even further.

Milk is one food that is required under the National School Lunch Program. If schools don’t serve milk with students’ meals, the federal funding assistance for the meals themselves will be lost.

Wisconsin officials at the Department of Public Instruction and Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection said last fall that the problem was most acute in the central part of the state.

Today those school children in Central Wisconsin are enjoying their daily milk from the Weber’s Farm Store bottling plant. That bottler is part of a group of family-owned businesses that includes Nasonville Dairy as well as a dairy farm.

“All my grandchildren complained about the milk they were getting at school so we decided to do something about it,” says Ken Heiman, whose family owns and operates the bottling plant, a cheese factory called Nasonville Dairy and a dairy farm known as Heiman Holsteins that supplies the milk to the bottling operations.

The family had been packaging milk in plastic pouches since the 1970s and it was easy to downsize the pouch to an 8-ounce size that could be handled by school nutrition programs, and the kids.

“They understood how to stick the straw in the pouch in a heartbeat. It’s like a juice box,” Ken said. “The school districts love it because it cuts their garbage by 80 percent and the price is less.”

At schools supplied by Weber’s last year, sales of 8-ounce packages averaged about 50 more per day per school than the volume from the previous supplier. A year ago Heiman said his family’s dairy plant supplied milk to five area parochial schools.

This year 17 school districts in the region are using the milk that is packaged by his family. The bottling plant is considered a producer/handler business since only milk from the family’s 500-cow Holstein herd is bottled there.

Ken said his animals have all been tested and verified to produce only the A2A2 milk protein.

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