Product Review: Wilcox Farms Organic Milk
Our local Costco has stopped stocking the privately labeled Kirkland Organic Milk. In its place, they now sell single gallon sized containers of Wilcox Farms Organic Milk. After sampling a bit of this new product, I am very disappointed by the switch. The Wilcox Farms Organic Milk tastes no better than the discount $2/gallon non-organic garbage stocked at many of the local grocery chains. It is utterly undrinkable.

I am a bit surprised, since am a very big fan of the Wilcox Farms Egg Nog (see here). But the egg nog (like Kirkland's Organic Milk and most other organic milk I have tried) is packaged in paper (cardboard) containers. It may be that the plastic container reacts badly with the milk, leaching some kind of component into to the milk that give the Wilcox Farms brand an acidic and foul aftertaste. Blech. I can hardly write this review without cringing. We won't be buying any more milk from Costco if they continue to stock this.

Update: As JT Wilcox (Chief Financial Officer, Wilcox Farms) notes in comments:

"You're right. We quickly re-directed and switched to paper."

    - JT Wilcox

Wilcox Farms switched to paper containers not long after Costco switched to the Wilcox Farms brand (and *ahem* not long after I posted my original scathing review ).

The new paper-packaged Wilcox Organic Farms milk is an improvement over the plastic-packaged Wilcox Organic Farms milk. However, it still does not taste as good as many other organic milk brands that I have tasted (which I sampled while I was boycotting the Wilcox Farms plastic-ky stuff). Furthermore, it does not taste as good as the product it replaced, Costco's privately-labeled Kirkland Organic Milk. And I say that despite the recent allegations that Costco's privately-labeled organic milk (from Aurora Organic Diary) may not have been 100% organic (maybe it was 96% organic?). The Wilcox Farms organic milk still leaves a sour aftertaste that I find annoying (though certainly not as strong as it previously was). I really can't drink the Organic Farms milk straight out of a glass without eating something else to chase away the aftertaste. So the new paper-packaged Wilcox Farm organic milk is not undrinkable, but nearly so (sorry JT).

We buy the Wilcox Farms brand now only because Kristy is at Costco so often and we consume a lot of milk - so it is convenient to buy milk there. I encourage Kristy to buy elsewhere, but she is loathe to make a separate trip to Albertson's, QFC, or Safeway just to buy better tasting milk (the Wilcox Farms brand is "good enough" for her). But if I had my druthers, we would buy better tasting organic milk to stock in the fridge, such as the organic milk by Organic Valley (my new favorite) or Horizon.

(Update Wed Dec 26 06:32:06 PST 2007 // promoted comments by JT Wilcox)