National milk committee renews innovation program

Thursday, October 13, 2011

by SUSAN MANN

A program designed to give processors who develop new innovative dairy products access to milk outside of their existing plant supply quotas was renewed for a further two years with some changes.

The national Canadian Milk Supply Management Committee approved renewing the Domestic Dairy Product Innovation program at its meeting earlier this month after postponing making a decision earlier in the year.

The program was reviewed and renewed every five years until last year when it was extended for one only year because committee members couldn’t reach a consensus.

The current program began Aug. 1, 2011 and runs to July 31, 2013. Canadian Dairy Commission chief of commercial operations Laval Létourneau says program changes include:

•    reducing the timeframe a new product can remain under the program to three years from five;
•    adding a five million litres per year limit to the amount of milk processors can receive; and
•    increasing the total amount of milk available under the program to three per cent of national market-sharing quota from two per cent.

For the 2010-11 dairy year, there were 98 contracts issued to 33 different processors who used 72.87 million litres of milk. The program is particularly popular in Ontario. “A huge portion of the applications that we are receiving come from Ontario,” Letourneau says. BF