When Is Breakstone's Not Breakstone's?

Sam Breakstone apparently had a thing about milk.  According to one 1977 commercial, he turned away most milk as not good enough for his dairy products.

Some time after Breakstone supposedly perfected his dairy recipes, Breakstone's ended up in the hands of Kraft.  That may be okay.  Perhaps Kraft dedicated itself to meeting his high standards.  Or, perhaps Kraft considered Breakstone's as a brand name under which to market whatever products they were making anyway.  They wouldn't just license the name - collecting a yearly fee for allowing somebody else to call its products Breakstone's.

Meet the Breakstone's line of butters:

and the rest of the line of products.

These Breakstone's butters are manufactured by Keller's Creamery, under license by Kraft.  The current incarnation of Keller's dates only from about 2000, but the old brand of Keller's butters go back over a hundred years.  Keller's produces Borden, Hotel Bar, and the very foreign-sounding Plugra.

Despite all of these different brands, Keller Creamery appears to manufacture all of them in its plant in Winnsboro, Texas.  You can see the factory from above.

Now, I find it difficult to believe that Keller's, a plant in Texas, is adhering to the strict expectations and recipes of Sam Breakstone, who seems to have been a New Yorker.  It's not impossible, though, that all of those butters under all those labels are subtly different.  Plugra is definitely a different product than the usual butter (less moisture, more fat).

And there's at least one difference between Breakstone's and the other butters.  Breakstone's proudly announces this it's certified Kosher.  I'm not sure what that entails - they sang the dreidel song to the cows or something.  But you don't see Borden's bragging about being Kosher.

On another note, here is the Kosher certificate for Borden - the same as for Breakstone.

And this doesn't end with Keller's.  Kraft doesn't license the Breakstone's name to Keller's.  Kraft licenses it to Dairy Farmers of America, Inc., of which Keller's is just one subsidiary.  It says it right there on the website:   Processed and Marketed by Dairy Farmers of America, Inc., under a trademark owned and licensed from Kraft Foods, Inc. 


The DFA may sound like a friendly co-op of milk farmers, but it's big business.  They have about 9,572 member farmers, 3,000 employees, and 21 manufacturing plants (none in Breakstone's original home of New York).  They're milking 1.8 million cows for $8.1 billion in net sales in 2010.

The DFA doesn't just make milk, butter and cheese.  They own Agri-Max financial, which loans money to its members farmers.  They even have their own lobbying efforts.  They were even part of a class-action suit alleging monopolistic practices.

There's no doubt the DFA does a lot of good.  It uses its large size and purchasing power to make dairy farming affordable across the US.  It's engaged in green projects and attempts to help farmers actually graze their cattle on real grass in those climates where it's available and makes sense financially.

The question, though, is whether a unique Breakstone's quality and flavor can survive all of this corporate centralization and licensing.  The question is whether there ever was a unique Breakstone's quality and flavor to begin with.

The DFA's license from Kraft seems good evidence that the answer is no.