Raw milk delivered directly to home in HCMC
Wednesday, July 17, 2013, 10:13 GMT+7
At 9 a.m. every day since the start of this year, Nguyen Kim Ngan receives a familiar guest, a milkman who delivers three litters of raw, unprocessed milk stored in glass bottles to her home.
“The milk has just been produced from a farm in District 12, and remains warm when delivered,” says Ngan, an accountant who lives in District 1.
Like Ngan, many Saigonese, instead of buying bottled milk from the supermarkets, now love to have the milkmen knock on their doors and deliver products that are freshly milked from farms in the city outskirt.
Ngan says she was at first wary of the quality of this kind of unprocessed milk, but ended up closing a long-term delivery contract with the farm.
“There have been no bad incidents, while all members of my family love the milk flavor,” she says.
Similarly, Thuy Trang, an air ticket agent, and Ngan Ha, a lawyer, have had fresh milk from farms in Cu Chi District directly delivered to their house or office for nearly a year.
“The quality is great, but the only setback is that you have to dump the product should it be left overnight,” Ha shares her experience.
The fresh and unprocessed milk also attracts more and more customers thanks to its reasonable prices compared to the bottled counterparts on sale at supermarkets citywide.
A liter of freshly milked product fetches only VND18,000 (US$0.86), and delivery fee is only VND4,000 per liter. In the meantime, the bottled product costs up to VND32,000 a liter.
Dairy farms go online
For owners of the milk farms, home delivery is another good outlet for their products, besides selling to dairy plants, while prices are also higher.
Huynh Quoc Tri, who runs a dairy farm in Thu Duc District, said he delivers some 70 to 90 liters to customers in 40 different places in the city on a daily basis.
Tri charges customers VND18,000 for every liter of the milk, a price he said is still VND4,000 per liter higher than what milk processing plants pay him for the same product.
Many other farms have set up websites or created Facebook pages to reach more customers, while sharing with them tips to sterilize and preserve the milk.
Some even organized tours for customers to their farms to experience the milking process first-hand, in order to build trust about their product quality.
Most dairy farms usually deliver the products twice a day, at 6:30 – 9 a.m., and 6:30 – 8 p.m., immediately after they are milked.
| Vuong Ngoc Long, acting director of the Bo Sua Vietnam Co, said customers should be careful when using the freshly milked products. Long said the unprocessed milk may contain biotic residues or pathogens, while it will be very difficult to trace the milk origin in case customers are affected with health problems. Meanwhile, the US federal government said Tuesday that fresh milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurized milk, Washington Times reported. The states where so-called “raw milk” is available had twice the rate of dairy-related disease outbreaks, it cited a review by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. |
