1. Shamrock Farms
Transparency is an increasingly important part of many food brands. To put it simply, consumers now expect access to information concerning a product, its origins, and the means by which it was made. Milk is no different, especially given consumers’ growing concerns regarding the environmental sustainability of dairy products.
Shamrock Farms is not a brand that has prioritized transparency in the past. The brand allegedly operated a dairy in Arizona illegally for multiple years. During this time, the company was accused of not following the USDA organic regulations while still selling its milk as an organic product. Mark Kastel, a senior farm policy analyst for The Cornucopia Institute said: “We found inadequate, overgrazed pasture adjacent to their milking facility, and we were told by Shamrock employees that the confined cows had not been out in weeks … This dairy operation never should have been certified in the first place and it’s unacceptable that it took more than three years from the time of our complaint to the announcement of this enforcement action.”
It’s not just Shamrock Farms’ cows that have been treated unfairly. In 2020, the company paid out more than $850,000 after the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found that Shamrock Farms discriminated against potential employees based on their gender, race, or national origin. We think this is another reason, if one was needed, to steer clear of Shamrock Farms’ products.
2. Fairlife Dairy
Fairlife Dairy is a brand owned by The Coca-Cola Company. In 2022, the company reported over $1 billion in annual retail sales. While obviously very successful, Fairlife was the target of much anger from animal rights supporters on two separate occasions. The first resulted from Fairlife’s marketing, which included misleading slogans suggesting the cows’ living conditions were far superior to what they actually were.
A 2019 video taken at a Fairlife-owned farm was the source of much greater outcry. It showed calves being beaten, burned, and stabbed by employees for no apparent reason. These horrific abuses led many consumers and stockists to boycott Fairlife’s products. Since this time, the video has resurfaced on multiple occasions. On one of these occasions in 2021, a spokesperson for Fairlife insisted that the brand had since cut ties with this farm.
In the years following 2019, Fairlife has invested millions of dollars into animal welfare programs. These include animal inspections and reviews of the bovines’ living conditions. Despite this, we cannot recommend a brand that has sourced milk from abusive farms.