The dairy section here was fully updated in the remodel, including those nice-looking but super flimsy doors that so many stores are using these days. Hopefully the dairy here is actually fresh, unlike at my local Safeway which I caught selling expired milk (which didn't even have the 50% off stickers) last week! Meanwhile, Darigold milk (which I never buy because it's so much more than the store brands) has recently started showing up with dates several months in the future -- I wonder if they're using the same sort of process as that shelf-stable milk I saw in Italy!
Comments
Ha, perhaps Safeway thinks they have already merged with Kroger if they are selling expired milk without even being marked down! Admittedly, Kroger's milk expiration dates around here are highly variable. It is not uncommon for them to have milk for sale that doesn't expire for as long as 15-16 days, but then you might see milk that's expiring the next day which may or may not be marked down. Most other grocers around here sells milk that expires about 5-8 days from the 'best by' date so you might do much better or worse at Kroger.
ReplyDeleteKroger's milk comes from Ft. Worth, TX from the Vandervoot dairy plant so it does have some distance to cover before it gets here. Granted, I think Safeway's ice cream and such sold at Randall's comes all the way from Washington! HEB's milk plant is in Houston, but in my experience (I don't shop there often), their dates don't really indicate that their milk is any fresher than anyone else's milk.
At least as far as Oregon goes, in my experience at Fred Meyer in Portland last year, their milk expiration dates were as good as, if not better, than the best case scenarios for Kroger here in Houston. I was quite impressed with their dairy set up and it was on a list of things I noted that were better at Fred Meyer than at our Krogers.
I'm not familiar with Darigold so I don't know if it is sold here. Borden is often the expensive milk brand here, but I don't even know who sells it aside from Food Town who I know still sells it. I usually buy store brand milk, or something from Oak Farms since that's what Food Town sells at a more reasonable price and Randall's sells Oak Farms milk as well. Of course, around here, Kroger sells their own brand of milk as the premium store brand and then they sell Springdale as the 'Value Corner' store brand equivalent. I think that over in the land of the Delta Division and such, Kroger only sells the Kroger brand as far as store brand milk goes.
That's correct on the Delta Division!
DeleteHa! I'm not sure where Kroger's milk comes from around here, but it seems they have local plants, since their store brand milk is actually branded QFC or Fred Meyer, not just Kroger like basically all of their other store-brand products.
DeleteDarigold is another northwest company, based in Seattle and focusing mostly on milk (though they do sell cheese too -- it's not as good as Tillamook). I'm not sure how wide of a range they have, but they're the main "name brand" milk around here, and what you would generally find in smaller stores that don't have store-brand milk (though Safeway and QFC/Fred Meyer sell Darigold too).
As far as I can tell, QFC and Fred Meyer don't have a milk brand below their store brand (which they sell at the same price as Safeway Value Corner), but they do have Simple Truth as a higher-end store brand. (But that's more like Safeway's O Organics than Lucerne.)