Our White Milk
At Lewis Road Creamery, we’re on a journey to bring you best dairy that we can, and milk that’s quite simply the way it should be.
GRASS FED & NON-GMO
Eating greens is what makes cows happy & healthy. Lewis Road milk is packed with goodness from pasture-fed cows, living on a handful of farms in the Waikato We’re not shy to say, we think Aotearoa New Zealand should proudly stay Non GMO. Our milks come from farms that are verified free from GMOs. Our cows love the view here, so we don’t do live exports either.
NO PALM PRODUCT FEED
Which means we’re not party to tropical rainforest deforestation.
Our White Milk Range comes from cows that are not fed Palm Kernel Expeller (PKE), a by-product of the palm oil industry. As it happens, New Zealand is the world’s largest importer of PKE, where it’s used as a feed to supplement cows’ diets[1]. It’s a feed that’s cheap to purchase, and cows love to eat it, which means it helps farmers boost their milk production. Just like palm trees Orangutans thrive in wet tropical areas. Some palm forestry is replacing native rainforests and displacing native and diverse flora and fauna in these forests, including Orangutans. Even though PKE is a by-product of the palm oil industry, we here at Lewis Road Creamery have chosen to start our journey to farm without it and take a stand against the negative environmental impact of palm oil production. Our PKE-free range of fresh white milk and 10-star butter means we're doing our bit to ensure our milk can be orangutan friendly and better for the planet, and for you.
NO PERMEATE
Our milks have nothing added and nothing taken away (unless it’s the fat for our skinny milk, which we’re okay with).
We don’t add highly-processed products like permeate to standardise what’s in the bottle, and we don’t feed our cows palm kernal products to pump up production. Our cows eat grass, so when the grass changes, so does our milk.
Milk is a complete food containing a natural abundance of essential nutrients. There is still much to learn in science about the different functional properties of milk across the different months of the dairy season. But what we do know is that the Lewis Road milk in your coffee is always gorgeous grass-fed milk from happy, healthy cows.
100% RECYCLED PLASTIC FOR OUR BOTTLE
We led the way to change our bottles, so you won’t find any virgin plastic in them. We started the journey in August 2018, converting our milk bottles to 100% recycled plastic bottles – saving 210 tonnes of plastic in the first 12 months. Since October 2019, our entire white milk, flavoured milk and cream range has been bottled in this rPET packaging which is made entirely from recycled plastic. Since the shift to these bottles, we have saved nearly 1,000 tonnes of plastic in NZ. Not only are these bottles made from recycled plastic, they are also 100% recyclable. This innovation has also been recognised with a Gold award in the special Sustainability Category at the 2020 WorldStar Packaging Awards[2].
Our journey doesn’t stop there, we are also proud to say that we were the first milk producer to sign the New Zealand Packaging Declaration, committing to 100% of our packaging being recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025 or earlier. We are working on the rest of our packaging to meet this commitment.
Sources:
[2] https://www.fmcgbusiness.co.nz/lewis-road-scores-gold-at-worldstar-packaging-awards/