Canned Fresh Milk

GOODS & SERVICES

Dairies do things to milk that cows never dreamed of: they pasteurize, homogenize and vitaminize it. But they have never been able to process whole milk commercially so that it would stay fresh indefinitely. Last week, in a brand-new, $125,000 plant in East Stanwood, Wash., Med-O-Milk, Inc. turned the trick. It was producing 2,200 gallons a day of canned milk that stays fresh for months. Unlike concentrated milk (TIME, March 26), it needs no refrigeration. Med-O-Milk has the same food value as whole milk and, unlike condensed, evaporated or powdered milk, it tastes like fresh milk.

Med-O-Milk is the result of a milking method developed by Dairy Expert Roy R. Graves, 64, who spent 28 years in the Department of Agriculture, and John Stambaugh, a Chicago businessman and gentleman farmer. On Stambaugh's Wood-Jon farm in Valparaiso, Ind., Graves made a machine that pumps milk straight from the cow into a stainless steel vacuum tank without letting the milk come in contact with the bacteria-laden air.

The milk is then hustled to the cannery to be homogenized, flash-sterilized and sealed in lacquer-lined cans (by the Martin Aseptic Canning System) without any contact with the air. The result: milk completely free of bacteria.

Said Graves: "All we did was to combine a number of ideas into a process." By avoiding the use of sugar or long periods of heat to kill off bacteria (the methods used in condensed and evaporated milk), Med-O-Milk also avoids their cooked taste.

Graves and Stambaugh will license canners, dairymen, etc. to use their method (Med-O-Milk is the first). At current wholesale prices (31.1-c- a quart), canned milk is no threat to fresh milk in the U.S. But Graves & Stambaugh think there is a big market where fresh milk is expensive or unobtainable (e.g., Alaska, on shipboard, in mining camps).

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