The Business of Better Milk: John Miller and Marie Miller, Co-Owners of Miller’s Dairy, on Scaling with Integrity

I grew up on a dairy farm at Cookstown, and we met in Junior Farmers years ago.

It was really Johnny's dream to do the processing industry.

I grew up showing cattle, and I'm more the animals.

But I went back to school at 40 to become a teacher, and I learned a lot in that process.

Going to school, I never used computers, and you learn.

Yeah,

yeah.

And I took psychology.

You learn a lot through the process, and I think that really helped us in our business.

Right, right on.

And John, you've got a heritage in this business.

Your family goes back.

Did I see that somewhere, great-great-grandfather was the first to put dairy in a glass bottle? Yeah,

great-grandfather, yeah.

Sam Bissett in Godreach, Ontario, yeah.

1896, first dairyman to put... milk in a glass milk bottle because they had been driving around town with a tank on a horse, pulled by a horse and wagon.

And, you know, they were looking for more hygienic ways.

As my great uncle said, he, you know, in the summertime, you'd, before you opened up the lid, you'd have to shoo all the flies away from the lid and

And Marie, you were just making that hand motion.

People were...

So they would scoop it out of a barrel, basically, right? You'd open the lid

and pick the flies out and then scoop, you know, and this was all...

How did people survive, you wonder? Well,

that's interesting that the pasteurization law in Ontario came into effect in 1937, but prior to that, cities like Toronto had bylaws as early as 1900 that milk had to be pasteurized, so...

And that was the Women's Institute that brought that into effect because children were dying from unpasteurized.