From Marion Nestle’s blog Food Politics yesterday:

I’m catching up on reading and just ran across a report about the accomplishments of the dairy checkoff. This, you will no doubt recall, is the USDA-sponsored program that collects a “tax” from dairy producers and uses the funds for generic promotion of dairy products. What fills the folks running the checkoff with pride? Among them,

• Focusing on dairy health and wellness by helping to combat childhood obesity by encouraging schools to implement physical activity and good nutrition, including dairy.
• Partnering with Domino’s Pizza to develop pizzas using up 40% more cheese than usual. This worked so well that other pizza chains are doing the same thing.
• Partnering with McDonald’s to launch McCafe specialty coffees that use up to 80 percent milk, and three new burgers with two slices of cheese per sandwich. The result? An additional 6 million pounds of cheese sold.
• Creating reduced lactose milks in order to bring lapsed consumers back to milk. The potential result? An additional 2.5 to 5 billion pounds of milk each year.
• Partnering with General Mills’ Yoplait to develop yogurt chip technology that requires 8 ounces of milk.
• Maintaining momentum for single-serve milk by offering white and flavored milk in single-serve, plastic, resealable bottles.