Last Friday, we received the long-awaited and exciting news that the Fair Go Dairy® logo scheme has been granted ACCC authorisation for the next five years.
Developed with the assistance of the Queensland government, the Fair Go Dairy logo will help consumers identify and support dairy brands paying their farmers a sustainable and fair farmgate price and whose products are made using milk from Queensland farms and Queensland cows.
When consumers buy a brand with the Fair Go Dairy logo they know that the dairy products they buy meet these criteria:
- The purchase price for the milk (per litre) is not less than the sustainable and fair farmgate price, using no less than 80 per cent unprocessed milk purchased from a farmer where the farmer's farm is located within Queensland.
- The milk is derived from dairy cows located within Queensland.
- No milk used in the products may be sourced from outside of Australia.
As a strategic marketer of two decades, this has certainly been the most challenging logo development I have been involved with.
We had to convince the dairy industry that, small as we are, QDO could lead the way towards a fairer price for dairy farmers.
We had to convince the supermarkets to introduce the 10c Drought Levy on private label brands to demonstrate that processor milk cheque payments could be split so that some brands and products that could meet all the logo criteria could apply.
We had to demonstrate that $1-litre milk was no longer viable or sustainable and prove that Australian consumers were more interested in the survival of the industry, which after nine hard years, we succeeded in doing in February 2019.
And as a final hurdle, we were forced by powers with more financial backing than QDO, to undergo the arduous and costly ACCC authorisation process.
All of this was necessary to get a simple logo onto the brands and products that are paying their farmers a sustainable and fair farmgate price and whose products are made using milk from Queensland farms and Queensland cows.
There are still some final adjustments to be made, contracts to be signed and audits to be done but there will be several brands able to use the logo almost immediately.
Unless there are any further obstacles to overcome, QDO intends to launch the Fair Go Dairy logo in June.
I hope you all will support this initiative and buy the brands that best support our Queensland dairy industry and would like to thank you all for the encouragement we have received over the past three years.
Let's all raise a glass of fresh Queensland milk to the soon-to-be-launched Fair Go Dairy logo scheme.
