About once a week the phone rings at the Dill Pickle Food Co-op in Chicago’s artsy Logan Square neighborhood with the same question: Got milk? Organic, to be exact.
“I’ll have people call up and say, hey, I know the truck’s coming on Tuesday, can you put aside three half-gallons?” said Dana Bates-Norden, 33, who works as the buyer of perishable goods for the store, which in 2014 started selling out of the glass-bottled milk it gets from Midwest organic dairies within two days. “When I first started two years ago, I felt like I ended up having to write off a lot of organic milk, and now, I really can’t keep it in stock.”
Americans spent an estimated $35 billion on organic groceries in 2014. About $5.1 billion of that went to dairy, more than doubling from a decade earlier, data from the Nutrition Business Journal published on the U.S. Department of Agriculture website show. With retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. trying to attract more organic-food shoppers while McDonald’s Corp. uses the milk — which can cost almost twice as much as regular — in some McCafe coffees, producers are struggling to keep up with demand.
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