Stewart’s wins back-to-back milk awards

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For the second year in a row, Cornell University’s Department of Food Science named Saratoga Springs-based Stewart’s Shops as the dairy processor with the highest quality milk in New York state. Stewarts’ milk was judged best by a panel of experts at the State Fair in Syracuse Monday.

Stewart’s earned the title with a score of 93.4 after a year of random testing. Upstate Niagara Cooperative of Buffalo earned the silver medal with a score of 92.5.

Marguerite Petit, director of quality assurance for Stewart’s Shops, said her company is pleased to have taken the state title two years in a row, and three of the last four years.

“We have high standards for our farms. We have high standards for ourselves,” she said. “We see it day in and day out, our milk products hold up well past code. The fresh milk that we get is from our farms and within 48 hours it’s in the shops. You don’t see that in very many places.”

Last year Stewart’s scored a perfect 100 and beat out Wendt’s Dairy of Niagara Falls which came in second with a score of 94.4 after posting a perfect 100 in 2004. Wendt’s fell out of the top five this year.

“Believe it or not the guys were pretty disappointed we didn’t get a perfect 100 again,” Petit said. “There aren’t a lot of perfect 100s scored, it’s not an easy testing process.”

The annual contest is part of the New York State Milk Quality Improvement Program, based at Cornell and sponsored by the New York Milk Promotion Order. Kathryn Boor, a professor of food science at Cornell and the program’s director, said milk producers allowed milk to be taken at unannounced visits from their dairy plants from July 1, 2007 to June 30 in order to qualify for this year’s contest.

More than 300 milk samples were collected and nearly 3,000 tests were run to determine the winners. The milk was first examined when it was received and again 14 days later, near the sell-by date. Microbiological and chemical tests were performed, and a specially trained panel of “milk lovers” tasted each sample and scored it based on flavor and stability during shelf life as well as butterfat content and bacterial counts within the milk’s sell-by date.

Boor said since Cornell began ranking the top five producers in 1997 the competition has helped the Milk Quality Improvement Program’s goal of spurring higher quality production practices throughout New York’s milk production industry.

“We can chart, in general, the increased scores throughout the state. In New York state we have our dairy plants competing with each other for bragging rights,” Boor said.

With that said, the top scores from the 19 plants participating in the contest this year were slightly down from last year when the second place score would have beaten this year’s top two finishers. Boor said that doesn’t usually happen.

“The testing hasn’t changed, it’s just exquisitely rigorous. To get a 100 is, well we didn’t even think it would be possible when we set up the criteria originally. Then we were blown away when Stewarts achieved that last year,” she said.

Petit said Stewart’s will likely incorporate its back-to-back first place finish into the company’s marketing and advertising campaigns.

Another local dairy, Midland Farms Dairy in Menands, came in third place this year. Byrne Dairy of Syracuse and Hillcrest Dairy or Moravia placed fourth and fifth respectively.