Horizon Milk Lowers Fat Content to 1%

I went to Whole Foods Market the other day to buy Horizon Organic Milk in the non-perishable Tetra Paks. This is the only place that I know of to buy the 18 pack of regular milk (not chocolate or vanilla milk which is sold at Babies R Us and other places). So, to my dismay, Whole Foods did not have any 18 packs left! I even asked for help to see if they had any in the back. Unfortunately, I was told that Horizon is revamping their milk products to lower the milk fat content to 1% from 2%. Whole Foods did not know when they would be getting the new 1% Horizon 18 pack of milk, so I went home empty-handed. My task was foiled by a company's mission to reduce the fat content of milk, go figure! I guess milk is viewed as "fattening" nowadays, so heaven forbid our kids drink 2% milk, let alone whole milk (which is practically taboo!).

I like keeping some of these Horizon Tetra Paks on hand for emergencies. They are perfect because they don't need to be refrigerated and they have a long shelf life. I can just throw one in my purse and go. They taste better chilled, but in a pinch, they are fine at room temperature. Horizon Tetra Paks are just very convenient for packing in lunches and taking on long outings because I don't have to worry about the milk spoiling.

Anyway, I went back home and looked up Horizon Milk on Amazon and sure enough it was there! I placed my order and saved an additional 15% with Amazon Subscribe and Save, so it ended up being less than Whole Foods' price.

When the milk arrived the next day (I love Amazon Prime, the two-day shipping is more like one-day shipping for some items! BONUS!!), it was packaged differently (they changed the tint of the blue on the box) and it was 1% milk, instead of 2%! So, even though Amazon indicated 2% milk on the product description page, 1% milk showed up at my doorstep. At least Whole Foods gave me a heads up about this change. How bizarre! I guess Horizon doesn't want to sell 2% milk anymore.

Anyway, it would be nice if Horizon still offered the 2% milk to customers as a choice. Heavens, Horizon's chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla milks are a lot worse for kids than plain 2% milk, but they seem to have no problem pushing those unnecessarily sugar-laden flavors onto kids' palettes! I'll take 1% more milk fat over the 27g of sugar packed in Horizon's chocolate milk! That's more than double the sugar in the plain milk. I keep waiting for Costco to sell the plain organic milk in Tetra Paks, but Costco will only sell chocolate milk! I seriously don't know what's up with that. I think people would buy the plain milk if it were available to them--not EVERYONE wants the added sugar in chocolate milk!  I have tried very hard not to give my son chocolate milk (despite the cheap price at Costco) or any of the flavored milks because I did not want him to get hooked on them, and I did not want him to reject drinking plain milk. I figured if he didn't know about those flavored milks, he wouldn't know to ask for them. (Of course, I know he would LOVE chocolate milk! But, I'm trying to hold off as long as possible, so he doesn't crave it. So far, so good!)

I researched the prices of flavored milks, and at some places, including Amazon, flavored milks are actually cheaper than the plain milk! That gives even more incentive for parents to buy these flavored milks over the plain milk, especially if there are monetary constraints involved. Which one will parents pick? Probably the cheaper flavored milk.

And, thus, the cycle of kids rejecting plain milk is reinforced and encouraged...

But hey, let's take away 1% of the milk fat because that's the "problem" these days.

Right...