Ethical milk brands

In this guide to dairy milk, we assess the policies and practices underlying UK milk brands. 

We investigate whether ethical milk exists, if there are any ethical dairy brands, what makes organic milk different, and what animal welfare standards to look out for. 

We also look at lobbying by big dairy brands like Arla and Müller and the role of supermarkets, especially around animal welfare and price, and how you can support local and higher-quality milk if you still consume dairy.

With growing awareness of the impact of livestock farming on the environment and climate, we also ask if any dairy milk is sustainable.

Our research into dairy milk recommends reducing dairy milk consumption overall, swapping in plant milks where you can, and going for the higher scoring brands in this guide if you can: these generally are organic and smaller dairies. 

With brand scores ranging from an incredibly low 3 (out of 100) to 80, there is definitely room to find something better than milk from the brands languishing at the bottom.

The dairy milk production cycle 

Cows produce milk in response to giving birth to a calf who will need to be fed. This means that repeated and forced insemination, pregnancy, calf separation, and milk extraction is the very structure of dairy as a mainstream business model. Dairy cows will typically go through this cycle for approximately three years, after which they will mostly be sent to slaughter. 

Dairy cows have been bred for their milk output, and average milk yield per cow has been increasing steadily as business demands greater output with less input. It’s estimated that the total milk collected from cows in the UK is around 12 billion litres per year. According to the UK National Milk Records, the winning herd of its most recent lifetime daily yield award produced an average of 21.5kg of milk solids per cow per day, though at different stages in lactation this can be much higher. 

That’s around 650kg of milk per month from just one cow.

Key welfare concerns of dairy milk

Given the relentlessness of repeated pregnancy and lactation, key welfare issues include mastitis (inflammation of the udder), lameness (difficulty walking), disease, and distress at calf separation. They also often experience poor housing and bedding, social stress, restriction and inability to express natural behaviours, and issues arising during handling, transport, and slaughter.

Painful procedures commonly used in the dairy industry include disbudding or dehorning of calves, where the horns of calves are removed chemically or with a hot iron. Although pain relief should be used and can limit pain experienced, there is evidence that pain persists after such procedures.

Pain has been shown to induce ‘anhedonia’, or a depressive state, in calves.

Our separate article on the typical life of a dairy cow has more information about these issues.

Is milk really vegetarian? 

Despite many viewing dairy as ‘vegetarian’ and therefore distinct from the meat industry, slaughter and the meat industry are part of the dairy industry. 

Although dairy animals have been bred for milk production, unless sexed semen is used, the breeding process often results in male and ‘surplus’ calves who are not directly useful to the main dairy business.

‘Surplus’ calves and the meat industry

According to Yeo Valley, around 80% of the UK's beef herd originally come from dairy production. While some calves may end up in the beef industry, or end up in the veal market, others will be killed after birth as they are not economically valuable.

Up until the ban on live animal exports very recently came into force in UK law as of May 2024, calves were routinely sent on gruelling long distance journeys to other countries, with severe and acute welfare challenges including food and water deprivation, injury, social stress, lack of resting space, high levels of confinement and even death. Although live animal exports are now banned in the UK, this is not true for the majority of other countries.

Companies with explicit and clear policies on their ‘surplus’ dairy calves were Acorn Dairy, Calon Wen, Co-op, Delamere, Hill Farm Real Food, Lidl, Sainsbury’s (from its questionnaire to us, this information is not public facing as a policy), Waitrose, and Yeo Valley.

Among the supermarkets, Waitrose and Lidl were the most transparent on their public-facing calf policies. 

The strongest calf policy we came across was from Hill Farm Real Food: “Any calves born here are reared on the farm, some to join our dairy herd, and the rest are grown for meat to be sold to our customers … Very occasionally, if we get a calf who doesn't have a suitable mother or foster mother, we will rear that calf by hand, but always using our own raw milk for several months.”

What is the ‘cow-with-calf’ dairy system? 

In natural settings, weaning is a slow process between 7 to 14 months, where behavioural development can occur at its own pace and both cows and calves can behave in ways they are naturally motivated to. They will also choose to remain close after this period. However, in the majority of commercial dairy systems, imposed separation happens abruptly, often close after birth or after a number of weeks. Organic systems also do this.

Following separation, alternatives are sometimes used to substitute the instincts calves would have towards their mothers, including buckets with rubber teats, in something akin to Harry Harlow's infamous monkey experiment with the wire mother fitted with a milk bottle. Sometimes pairs or groups of calves are housed together for social contact, where calves often attempt to suckle one another.

Unsurprisingly, research has found that women are the main demographic who oppose the practice of early calf separation from their mothers.

Cow-with-calf dairies allow calves and mothers to stay together close to the natural weaning period. A systematic review on cow-calf contact found that prolonged contact following a more natural weaning period results in more positive long term outcomes for cows and calves, with commercial milk production overall staying the same following a decrease during the nursing period (for obvious reasons). 

Cow-with-calf systems are also often pasture-based farms, with a focus on the ‘natural living’ dimension of animal welfare. In our guide, Hill Farm Real Food and Old Hall Farm keep their calves with their mothers until between 6 to 9 months of age.

A 2020 YouGov survey on UK farming practices found that while 40% of people in the UK believe that calves are regularly separated from their mothers between 24-48 hours after birth, 27% of people believe that calves are kept with their mothers until their natural weaning age. In reality, there are only around 25 cow-with-calf dairy farms in the UK out of many thousands. 13% of people believe that calves are never or only rarely separated shortly after birth.

The majority of cow-with-calf dairies are small and will either sell at the farm gate only or deliver to a small local radius. Search the national UK cow-with-calf directory if you want to find out if there's a farm near year. 

Understanding dairy cows

To give life to critical thinking around this topic we recommend watching the film Cow by Andrea Arnold, a poignant portrait of the life of one dairy cow, using no voiceover or human protagonists but only the camera to tell the cow’s story.

We also recommend the BBC documentary The Dark Side of Dairy, and the writing and art of Lynn Mowson, influenced by witnessing the killing of pregnant cows. Her chapter ‘Making and Unmaking Mammalian Bodies’ in the book Animaladies features her series aptly titled 'boobscapes'.

Standards and certifications for dairy milk 

Many companies sign up to certification schemes on their products to address concerns around the treatment of animals.

In the UK dairy sector, prominent schemes include Soil Association organic, Pasture for Life, RSPCA Assured, Pasture Promise, and Red Tractor. Most of the supermarkets in the guide cite Red Tractor in their animal welfare policies, including Aldi, Asda, Lidl, Ocado, Sainsbury's, and Tesco. 

However, Red Tractor’s dairy standards are very minimal in relation to animal welfare and barely go beyond what is already required by animal welfare law in the UK.

For more information about each scheme see our dairy milk assurance schemes article.

Does organic dairy milk have higher animal welfare standards?

Not including cow-with-calf systems, of the certifications available, organic standards are widely considered to be the highest welfare systems for dairy animals.

Key differences between Soil Association organic dairy and non-organic dairy include the requirement for animals to have access to pasture for the majority of the year when weather permits, have spacious and comfortable bedding (usually straw, as opposed to hard floor) when inside, a greater ability to express natural behaviours such as grazing, lying, and the ability to move away from other animals, and higher forage diets with no use of GM feed.

Although organic and pasture-based systems still present welfare challenges, overall research points towards outdoor access and pasture as more beneficial for animal welfare and the emotional states of cows compared to continuously housed animals.

Which brands sell organic dairy milk?

In this guide, there are some brands which are fully organic, and some which sell some organic milk along with non-organic milk. 

100% organic companies:

• Abel & Cole (predominantly organic, but some non-organic items, such as wild-caught fish)
• Acorn Dairy
• Calon Wen
• Daioni Organic
• Daylesford
• Hill Farm Real Food
• Riverford
• Yeo Valley (though its fresh milk is produced by Arla, under organic standards).

Companies with organic dairy options:

• Aldi
• Arla
• Asda
• Co-op
• Grahams
• Morrisons
• M&S
• Müller
• Ocado
• Sainsbury’s
• Tesco
• Waitrose.

How do dairy brands score in our dairy welfare rating?

The highest score a dairy company could get in the dairy welfare rating was 90/100, to reflect the fact that no system is perfect for animal welfare. 

We rated companies for three components: 

• their dairy system
• whether they had an explicit policy on ‘surplus’ calves, and 
• whether they had received reputable dairy animal welfare criticisms. 

The highest scoring dairy system was cow-with-calf, which included two companies in the guide – Hill Farm Real Food and Old Hall Farm. Although both sold beef in their farm shop which is likely connected to their dairy herds, Hill Farm Real Food also had an explicit policy for its calves on its website and so came out on top.

Fully organic dairy producers scored the second highest, with 100% Pasture for Life-certified dairies following behind. Hill Farm Real Food is the only 100% Pasture for Life-certified company in our guide (though as it’s also a cow and calf dairy, it gets the maximum points).

The majority of the companies in our guide had some accreditation, but many had points deducted for animal welfare criticisms, including undercover investigations on Müller and Arla farms which showed some cows kept indoors all year round. 

Since Müller and Arla dominated the supply for most of own-brand supermarket milk, most supermarkets scored very poorly, with the exception of Waitrose and M&S.

We couldn’t find any meaningful discussion of animal welfare for Dale Farm, Delamere and Iceland.

Why is dairy so bad for greenhouse gas emissions?

Dairy products have a high carbon impact compared to plant-based food and make up a significant part of food-related emissions. 

Globally, ‘livestock’ contributes 14.5% of human-made greenhouse gas emissions with dairy contributing around 20% of that amount. 

For the average person in the EU, around a quarter of all emissions from food come from dairy.

What accounts for the emissions from cows?

Cows are ruminants, meaning that they get their nutrients by eating plants and fermenting them in their stomachs.

The fermentation process produces gas by-products – mainly methane – which cows release by burping. Methane is a greenhouse gas with a much higher potential to warm the planet than carbon dioxide. 

Nearly 40% of ruminants’ contribution to global emissions comes from this digestive fermentation.

Cows also require large amounts of land, for living, grazing, and growing their feed. This is especially true of organically farmed cattle and other animals. Using land in this way has a relatively high carbon footprint compared to other agricultural land uses such as growing fruit and vegetable crops for us to eat directly.

It also means that the land cannot be used for non-agricultural ecosystems such as permanent forests or grasslands. These ecosystems absorb more carbon dioxide than they emit and help mitigate global heating.

Is low-emissions dairy milk possible?

Not really. 

There are some who claim that livestock have been unfairly targeted and that grazing animals can in fact help to capture carbon in grasslands in a way that compensates for the methane and other greenhouse gas emissions they generate. 

It’s true that soils store carbon. Carbon enters the soil when plants draw it from the atmosphere and take it down to their roots. As plants die and decompose some of this root carbon stays in the soil. Grazing animals can contribute to this process by stimulating new plant growth. However, the claims that this process can mitigate climate change have been debunked. A study by the University of Oxford found that only in specific circumstances can grass-fed livestock sequester carbon and that this sequestration is “small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate.”

Research into the impact of adding seaweed to the diets of cows has shown reductions in methane emissions but this is at an early stage. M&S has invested in a potentially methane-reducing diet for its dairy cow suppliers, while a ‘mask for cows’ to reduce emissions has already been around for a number of years. However, these kinds of actions are described as “dodgy tech fixes” by the NGO Feedback as they allow companies to avoid taking the most effective action which is to reduce production of meat and dairy.

The infographic below shows that cows' milk produces over 2.5kg of greenhouse gas emissions per litre of milk, whereas all the plant milks are less than half this amount. Similarly for land which is around 9 times higher for cow milk compared with almond, oat, rice and soya milk.

Which dairy brands are best for climate actions?

Our climate rating requires companies to discuss emissions reductions in their most significant areas of impact. For dairy companies, their most significant emissions come from their cows and so cannot be meaningfully reduced without reducing cow numbers. For this reason, all dairy companies in this guide scored poorly for climate.

Some small companies (Acorn Dairy and St Helen’s Farm) were taking positive steps such as generating their own renewable energy and sourcing their feed locally or growing it themselves, however, as these steps did not tackle emissions from cows, they did not score.

Arla scored particularly poorly because it had no meaningful discussion of reductions, did not report its emissions, and had twice been judged to be using misleading language such as net zero and climate neutral in its marketing.

Supermarkets and general food retailers scored relatively well on climate because they operate in many areas and were therefore assessed for climate reduction steps they had taken across their whole business, not just dairy.

Pollution and dairy products

Given all the other issues associated with industrialised dairy farming, pollution from excrement often gets forgotten.

Feeding millions of animals means that millions of animals are weeing and pooing into the environment all the time. Where corporations operate intensively, this means that a lot of pollution from waste can be highly concentrated.

Pollution from agribusiness is the leading form of river pollution in England, where only 14% of rivers meet the criteria for having a good ecological status.

In its 2024 report ‘Stink or Swim’, Sustain and Friends of the Earth point to ten animal agribusinesses that produce “the equivalent of over 120 double decker bus-loads of excreta per hour – almost double what is produced by the 10 largest UK cities”. 

No publicly available information could be found about what these companies were doing to prevent this waste from polluting rivers and the wider environment. 

The report estimated that Arla alone was responsible for 891 tonnes of excrement per hour, or 21,390 tonnes per day.

How much does dairy milk cost?

The price of milk is volatile and sharp fluctuations can cause dairy farmers to sell up and leave the sector, even when their family has owned a dairy herd for generations. 

Supermarkets have been criticised in the past for using their buying power to depress the price of milk paid to farmers. This may be about to change with new regulations which give farmers the power to challenge buyers on price decisions and set out the factors buyers must consider when setting prices.

Buy from small, local producers to pay fair price

Another way to ensure that farmers are getting a fair price for their milk is to buy from them directly. 

This guide only includes brands that can be bought nationally or at least in large areas of the country. But there are many milk producers, not included in this guide, who sell and deliver locally. Farmers Weekly has produced a map of such farms so you can find your nearest seller. The map doesn’t give any information about farms’ welfare or environmental standards so it’s best to check the cow-with-calf directory (discussed above) first to see if there’s a farm that delivers to you.

Price comparison: organic milk

All of the prices listed in the table below, with the exception of Old Hall Farm, are for organic milk. We couldn’t find a price for Müller’s organic milk, although it lists it as one of its products on its website. Crediton Dairy has its own brands and supplies supermarket brands, but its own-brand organic milk, Moo, is no longer available.

*Only available to purchase nationwide as part of its ‘dairy box’, otherwise click and collect only. Available to buy in Wales and Borders at selected shops. **Price from Watson and Pratts.
 

Supermarket milk

According to the UK dairy industry, around 96% of adults buy milk. Many of those purchases will be made in supermarkets where the majority of people do their food shopping.

Many UK supermarkets source their dairy from UK suppliers, meaning that those suppliers will need to comply with animal welfare legislation as set out in the Animal Welfare Act, as well as other legislation including The Mandatory Use of Closed Circuit Television in Slaughterhouses (England) Regulations which will also come into force in Wales in 2024. 

Some policies look fairly detailed but essentially just include what their legal obligations are. For example, when a company’s policy states that it uses CCTV in its slaughterhouses, it’s not doing anything extra – this is a legal requirement.

The majority of supermarkets also say that they subscribe to the ‘five freedoms’, which is also relatively meaningless in its focus to avoid the worst outcomes for animals and is now widely seen as outdated in animal welfare science.

Although Waitrose did not have a welfare certification other than its organic range, it stood out for its dairy welfare policy for non-organic cows: "All cows producing our milk spend a minimum of half of the year (183 days) grazing in fields but in practice, our dairy cows graze outdoors for longer – this is often closer to 200 days in reality”.

Who supplies supermarket own-brand milk?

Multi-billion-pound dairy multinationals Arla and Müller are the main milk suppliers across UK supermarkets’ own brand milk. Arla is the supplier for Aldi, Asda, and Morrisons, while Müller supplies Lidl, Sainsbury's and Tesco.

Both Arla and Müller have been heavily criticised for poor animal welfare practices, as well as portraying misleading images on their marketing of products which show cows with lots of space grazing outside in beautiful weather, whilst both companies operate zero-grazing systems with no pasture access as the majority of their business. This type of marketing is often seen as greenwashing.

In its latest 2023 report, the Business Benchmark for Farm Animal Welfare, which ranks companies according to their action on animal welfare, placed Müller in its bottom tier out of six for “no evidence” that it was taking animal welfare seriously, while Arla was in the second bottom tier for it being “on the business agenda” but with little evidence of implementation.

One of Arla’s stand-out policies is for heavily pregnant cows, where “cows more than seven months pregnant are not sent to slaughter”. How generous! A cow’s gestation period is very similar to humans, so that is a very heavily pregnant cow.

Many members of the public are not aware that pregnant cows are transported sometimes for hours without food or water in cramped conditions and following slaughter their unborn calves are used in the foetal bovine serum industry for research.

Big Dairy and lobbying

Nestlé, although it doesn't sell liquid milk, is the world's largest milk company by production, sourcing over 12 million tonnes of fresh milk from over 30 countries per year (that’s approximately 19 billion litres). Other dairy giants such as Arla and Müller follow not far behind. For these multinational powerhouses who monopolise the sector, dairy is big business and that’s how they want things to stay.

As profits of Big Dairy continue to rise in parallel with a rising scrutiny of the sector’s impacts, business strategies have evolved.

With concepts such as ‘climate emergency’ becoming more mainstream, lobbyists of Big Meat and Dairy attended COP28 in record numbers, where companies sent over 300 delegates to represent the interests of the animal agriculture industry. This was three times as many as were sent to the COP27 climate summit.

Rich, resourced, and powerful companies are paying attention to how to present themselves to stay in business, no matter what the harms are. Speaking to the Guardian, writer and activist Raj Patel said: “Just as with the influx of oil lobbyists, industrial agriculture businesses are scared. They have read the science and they know how much their business has driven the climate crisis.”

Whilst appropriating some of the language around climate concern, Big Dairy companies still plan to keep expanding and intensifying production. Coupled with the misleading marketing about the lives of dairy cows, there is very little to trust when it comes to large multinational dairy companies.

Workers’ rights in the dairy industry

Compared to other sectors, dairy companies publish very little information about the rights of workers in their supply chains.

Those that scored well tended to be smaller companies.

Acorn Dairy, Hill Farm, and Old Hall Farm got marks for manufacturing their products in-house (therefore having responsibility for their own workers). Acorn Dairy and Daioni did not appear to have their own policies covering supply chain workers, but they are certified organic by the Soil Association, which includes prohibitions on forced and child labour, so they got marks for having some limited supply chain policy.

Calon Wen’s OF&G organic certification doesn’t include any workers’ rights requirements, so it didn’t get any marks for policy. However, it was a small co-op and it got marks for having long-term relationships with its suppliers and for having good purchasing practices.

Müller, which supplies Lidl, Sainsbury’s, and Tesco, scored 0 (out of 100) for workers' rights. It lost marks for imposing a rota change on delivery drivers which required them to work weekends. According to Unite the Union, this was in breach of an existing agreement.

Additional research by Shanta Bhavnani.