Just got back from Toronto, my first time in Canada. Sure, the weather sucked, but I got to see the grocery stores with milk in bags!
Found this recent post on the subject of bagged milk that still doesn’t explain why people buy it. Does it have to do with some kind of all-natural straight-from-cow stuff? I assumed it would cost less, kinda like buying cereal in a bag instead of a box, but it costs more!
All the bags are 99% in French, too. What’s with this exclusivity, French Canada? :mad:
ps I deserve credit for not visiting the space needle thing. Road less traveled!
We have bagged milk, 1 litre packets, and it’s cheaper and easier to carry home. Only sold through one outlet that I know of, tho’. I don’t go out of my way to get it – but if I’m in th’ vicinity, it’s savings time!
Coffee baristas here always use bagged milk. It’s easy to pour when using a plastic jug.
I think it’s also more environmentally friendly, in terms of the weight of the waste produced - the empty bags are a lot lighter than empty cartons, take less energy to produce, and take up less space at the land fill. At least, that’s the explanation I got when I used to live in Ontario.
As for the language, are you sure you were looking at both sides of the package? Packaging is usually in English and French. It’s up to the package designer how to do that - sometimes one side is English and the other French, sometimes both languages are used on both sides.
From the POV of the supplier, bags are an ideal packaging solution; in the empty state, they take up very little space in storage and when transported - unlike, say, plastic bottles - which must either be manufactured at the bottling plant or transported full of air.
Also, in the empty state, the contents of the bag (i.e. nothing) are easy to keep sterile.
There was a brief stint in GA schools (Dekalb County) where school lunches had single serve milk-bags for students. I was one then, and well, lets count what was wrong with them:
1.Its in a bag, if it gets punctured…
2.Its in a bag… “Free” water balloon.
3.The milk from other bags rested on “newer” bags. Smelled delightful.
4.Its in a bag, students where given a straw… Blow it up, and pop it!
5.If you stretch the plastic with your finger, and then blow it up… you could make brests. (I did mention we where in elementary school then… right?)
I think the only thing it had going was that it was recycleable. But then so are the cartons.
I think the reason why we havent seen it US-side is because of Legacy. Milk is “supposed” to come in a carton. Distances are “supposed” to not be divisble by 10.
In the food service industry in the 'States, bagged milk is common.
On environmental friendliness: the container (pitcher) that you use for bagged milk is reusable, whereas a carton or plastic jug is not. Kind of like a water bottle vs. a juice box.
(Now don’t get too riled up about our peculiar food packaging (plenty of us learned rudimentary French from cereal boxes), or we’ll start in on your monochrome money. That is so last century. :))
Milk in a bag is nothing. I went to a baseball game in Managua, Nicaragua where the fans were drinking Pepsi, Castro-Cola or whatever out of baggies. It was cheaper than paper cups I suppose.
Held them in your hands and kept the hole closed with your thumbs, to drink, you raised it in the air like evoking the Blessed Mother Mary and drank. Odd, but nice and cool in your hands.
I’ve never seen single servings of milk in little baggies. Milk comes in cartons for 250ml, 500ml, 1L, and 2L. Only the 4L format is sold as bags. Sure, they can be punctured, but it’s pretty rare. I can see how giving miniature versions to kids could get messy, though, if they’ve got too much energy and imagination.
I like the bags because they take up less room in my recycling bin. Snip them open, wash them out, and you can stack a whole bunch of them in much less space than a big jug would take.
In the school district where I work (So Cal) we use bagged milk in the elementary grades. The main reason is the volume of trash is much lower so the schools need fewer pick-ups of trash, so they pay less to have it picked up.
In response to Meeko, the water balloon issue lasted about 1/2 of one day when we first introduced the milk; kids have short attention spans. I have never seen a bag break except while inside the larger bag which holds 90 small bags (1/2 pt.) so it affected only the cafeteria worker. (By the way, too bad DeKalb Co. GA doesn’t offer classes in spelling or grammar.)
I don’t know what that means.
We are happy with the bags.
Well, I don’t see it any different than Capri Sun fruit juice pouches. However, I admit I am unfamiliar with this type of product.
Are the plastic bags transparent?
Slight hijack - if this explanation is “true”, then why not legislate that all printers sold henceforth must be “two-sided” printers. Our company uses the primitive behemoths that only print on one side - and they print these multi-hundred page documents constantly. Multiply this by 1000000 other companies. Talk about killing trees!
Seems like we could save a helluva lot more landfill space if we outlawed single sided printers rather than force people to buy milk in bags.
Sheesh!
It was tried briefly in Australia in the late 70s. This was when we still had milk delivered. I remember the first day of the new system, the milkman gave us a little blue plastic jug. You’d drop the milk sachet in, snip one of the corners, and pour. It wasn’t popular and it didn’t last long before we went back to cartons / bottles.
In Thailand, you can buy iced coffee from street vendors. They mix it all up in a big cup, and then pour the coffee into a plastic bag with handles (like a smaller supermarket bag), poke a straw through the top, and hand it to you just like that.
Usually. Sometimes they’re tinted blue. The typical serving size (and actually the only size I’ve ever seen for personal use, as opposed to the larger plastic bags meant for cafeteria dispensers) is four litres divided into three 1.33L bags. The reusable ‘jug’ is plastic, dishwasher-safe and these days available in dollar stores.
Who’s being forced? Did bagged milk happen via legislative act? I remember about ten years ago when it was cardboard cartons, then it changed to plastic jugs. People adapted.
Right now I have a gallon milk jug in the fridge that is only ¼ full. It would be great if this was bagged so that there wouldn’t be a big air-filled container taking up prime top shelf refrigerator real estate. I’d also appreciate not having to jump up and down on the empty milk jugs to flatten them out before I toss them into the recycling bin.
The blue could be there to protect vitamins, in the US there are opaque yellow jugs for the exact reason. We also had the ‘milk pouch’ in high school. There were obligatory references to breast implants and an occasional stab through if you got overzealous. A really nice trick was milk warfare. Stab bag with straw, point straw at victim, squeeze bag. Detentions ended all of that by the second or third week. Another benifit from the food science POV is that cartons have head space, headspace has oxygen, oxygen oxidizes milk, oxidized milk tastes rancid. Bags could be filled without headspace so the milk tastes fresher longer.
Huh? Milk-in-bags isn’t legislated, it’s a choice made by manufacturers and consumers. You can still get milk in cartons or jugs if you want, but you get more milk for your money if you buy it in bags – and it’s less of a hassle to dispose of the garbage. Why buy a new hard plastic container every time you get milk? You buy one that’s designed to accomodate the bag, snip a corner off the top of each bag to open it, and you’re good to go.
You hardly see them in B.C. any more, which is a drag. (And we’re supposed to be the tree-hugger province.)
We grew up with bagged milk in my family, because my dad was in the CAF, and you could buy it on the base. It seemed like a step forward when that efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally sound option became available for consumers. Too bad our market didn’t go along.
Just a nitpick: The Space Needle is in Seattle. The big pointy thingy in Toronto is the CCN Tower. 
