inside this issue:
Graduation Postponed Details on page 10
University of Maine at Presque Isle Volume 42 Issue 10
No Need To Sleep! Details on page 14
Journalism for Northern Maine Visit us at utimes.umpi.edu
APRIL 1, 2014
Milked Chocolate Hannah Brilliant CONTRIBUTOR
Researchers at the University of Vermont released a study last week that suggests changing a cow’s diet can control the flavor of the milk. “This has huge implications for the future of chocolate and other flavored milks,” The Hershey Company’s spokesman, Alec Freitas, said in a press conference at UVM on Monday. The study tested milk samples from two hundred of the agriculture department’s cows. The study took place over a period of two years.
So what did they find? “The most exciting discovery for us,” farmer Jon McIntire of the UVM agricultural science program said, “was the mocha milk. We stopped bringing coffee to work, we were just drinking the mocha milk instead.” That’s right: mocha-flavored milk. McIntire said a combination of regular feed, cocoa beans and espresso beans produced a milk that tasted like the popular coffee drink. “The cows were a little hyper, but boy, the milk made it worth the extra work to get them to stand still at milking time.”
Jon McIntire feeding the cows cocoa beans.
The study was a partnership between the university and The Hershey Company five years in the making. “Hershey’s was approached by Dr. Gretchen Fields (Head of UVM’s agriculture department) in 2009 about the possibility of a study into flavoring milk,” Freitas said during the press conference. “It took a while to design an experiment both parties felt confident about.” Fields specializes in bovine husbandry and biology. She has been the brains behind the experiment from the start. “I was doing research with several of my graduate students back in 2009. We started noticing that the chemical makeup and flavor of the milk from the university dairy would change depending on the time of year. We connected that to the changes in the cows’ diet. One student and I started joking about chocolate milk from cocoa-eating cows. When the laughter died down we suddenly looked at each other like, ‘Wow, I wonder if it’s really possible.’ We put together a proposal that month to send to Hershey’s.”
The researchers tried five different diets: blueberry, s t r a w b e r r y, chocolate, mocha and vanilla. They hired blind tastetesters. The testers tried all the different flavors (including a control sample of unflavored milk) without Jon McIntireʼs daughter enjoying knowing which her first glass of chocolate milk flavor was which. The test straight from the cows! was 100 percent vored milks, so we want to conclusive. All the taste-testers make sure there is enough dereported tasting the intended fla- mand for the product before we vors. “When we really got down think about launching nationto sorting through all our data, I wide,” Freitas said. almost couldn’t believe it. I just McIntire is confident about kept thinking, ‘Why didn’t the future of UVM and Hersomeone study this sooner?’” shey’s flavored milks. “I can’t What’s next? Freitas and imagine that people won’t love Fields announced at the press the stuff as much as we do. And conference that they expect the if they don’t, I’ll still insist that milk to be in mass-production the UVM ag department keep its within six months. “We’ll start herd of mocha and vanilla dairy small, selling at UVM and at cows just for the staff. The Hershey Park. The flavors are stuff’s just that good.” not as bold as traditional fla-