I don’t know about you but I’ve always been a little confused about how the different dairy checkoff and promotion groups relate to each other. To help explain that I spoke with Tom Gallagher, CEO of Dairy Management, Inc. (DMI).

Tom spoke at the joint beef/dairy issues forum held here yesterday. He starts out explaining that DMI is a combination of the national dairy checkoff group working with state and regional groups to market dairy products around the world. He says they’ve created a membership partnership called the U. S. Dairy Export Council to handle international marketing.

On a domestic basis he says they’ve really focused on school nutrition, especially with all the concerns over childhood obesity.

Some of the stand out projects they’ve conducted include the conversion of fast food restaurants from cardboard milk containers to plastic containers containing milk and flavored milk. On the internet they’ve developed several nutrition information destinations like one called 3-A-Day of Dairy for moms that has over 100,000 registered.

He says that with all the heightened interest in nutrition the staffs of the two checkoff organizations have worked to develop a coalition of groups including USDA to help consumers make good nutrition decisions and combat negative efforts by some other groups that have proven harmful to farmers.

Listen to my interview with Tom here (6 min.): cisc-07-gallagher.mp3