APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — A donation of milk is pouring longer shelf life into food pantries in the Fox Valley.
Kemps, in partnership with Festival Foods, donated 800,000 shelf-stable Giving Cow milks to food banks throughout the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota, with more than 30,000 chocolate milk packs being delivered to Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin in Appleton this week.
The Giving Cow packs are single-serve, eight-ounce packs of ultra-high temperature pasteurized milk with a shelf life up to 12 months. Typically fresh milk only has a shelf life of 20 days and must be refrigerated. Giving Cow does not require cold storage.
The process is similar to what’s used to make whipping cream products, Kemps sales manager, Kevin Niemi says.
It tastes a little bit different than fresh milk but has all the same nutrients.
With milk being one of the most highly requested items for food pantries and having limited cold storage, this product is a great solution.
“Actually this whole program was conceived over five years ago just to kind of fit a niche out there with the smaller food pantries. The 30,000 units here today will actually go out to smaller food pantries in the region that really don’t have refrigeration. And our farm-family owners, who own Kemps, actually realized this was a problem and so this program got developed,” Niemi said.
Locally in Wisconsin, 437,000 people are facing food insecurity every day, including 142,050 children.
