You don’t want me to let you know that the US is within the midst of an obsession with protein. By now, you’ve most likely seen further protein in meals and drinks it as soon as didn’t belong: ice cream, popcorn, iced tea — even water. Google searches for “protein” have surged in recent times, and the macronutrient appears to be on the tip of each health influencers’ tongue.
However the influence of the protein craze goes past snacks and social media. It helped the meat trade obtain file gross sales in 2024, and it probably contributed to a stunning change in American consuming habits: Final 12 months, for the primary time in 15 years, customers elevated their cow’s milk consumption.
Maybe no firm has each benefited from and accelerated these converging tendencies greater than Fairlife, the Coca-Cola-owned milk model that comprises zero lactose and boasts 50 % extra protein and 50 % much less sugar than common milk. That distinctive dietary profile, achieved via a patented “ultra-filtration” course of, has helped flip Fairlife right into a billion-dollar enterprise in beneath a decade, rating second in name-brand refrigerated milk gross sales final 12 months.
“There’s this obsession with protein [among] younger males proper now that’s simply been blockbuster to” Fairlife, agriculture researcher Austin Frerick, creator of Barons: Cash, Energy, and the Corruption of America’s Meals Business, advised me. The corporate’s success has been a godsend for Coca-Cola, which turned Fairlife’s sole proprietor in 2020; it’s now the beverage big’s fastest-growing US model.
Fairlife has distinguished itself not simply with its excessive protein content material, but additionally by claiming that its milk is greater high quality than its rivals, its cows are handled humanely, and its farms are environmentally sustainable. “Imagine in higher,” reads one of many firm’s taglines.
That feel-good story has earned Fairlife’s husband-and-wife co-founders Mike and Sue McCloskey glowing profiles in Meals & Wine, NPR, and Fortune, together with invites to talk at conferences held by South by Southwest, Yale, Quick Firm, and TEDx.
Nevertheless it’s a narrative that has, in recent times, more and more collided with actuality. In 2019, an undercover investigation by the nonprofit Animal Restoration Mission (ARM) on the McCloskeys’ flagship farm in Indiana, a provider to Fairlife on the time, revealed horrific animal abuse: staff kicking calves within the head, hitting them with metal rods, and slamming them to the bottom, amongst many different cruelties.
Quickly after, the McCloskeys apologized. However since then, ARM has launched a number of further stomach-wrenching investigations into dairy farms that belong to Choose Milk Producers — a cooperative, additionally co-founded by the McCloskeys, of some 100 dairy farms that helped launch Fairlife and provide milk to it.
The most recent investigation, launched in late June, recorded employees at a New Mexico dairy hitting cows within the head with a metallic pipe, kicking them within the face and physique, dragging new child calves and grownup cows within the filth with a tractor, and quite a few different cases of abuse.
Fairlife advised Vox it hasn’t sourced milk from that farm since 2023, however ARM’s investigator shared proof on the contrary. Moreover, in a category motion lawsuit filed earlier this 12 months in opposition to Fairlife, Coca-Cola, the McCloskeys, and Choose Milk Producers, a gaggle of customers accuse Fairlife of deceiving prospects with claims of humane animal therapy, and allege that the New Mexico dairy farm did provide Fairlife on the time of the investigation.
Fairlife is much from alone. Farmed animals are largely exempt from federal and state animal cruelty legal guidelines, so trade welfare requirements are extremely low, and dairy producers are successfully left to police themselves. Previous investigations alleging horrific abuse are legion throughout the dairy trade, together with at dairy farms which have provided to Burger King, Domino’s, Land O’Lakes, Nestlé, Cabot Creamery, and different main meals manufacturers.
Between the early 2000s and the mid 2010s, many of those investigations turned high-profile information tales. The livestock trade reacted by advocating for legal guidelines to not criminalize animal abuse, however to criminalize the investigators who videotaped the abuse. The McCloskeys had a unique technique: They capitalized on this period of heightened concern round animal cruelty by promising transparency and humane therapy of their animals.
ARM’s slate of investigations have persistently undermined that narrative. However Fairlife has thrived despite all of it, revealing the results of customers’ willingness to consider story — or ignore a nasty one — within the pursuit of ever-more protein.
The “terrifying” therapy of cows at an alleged Fairlife milk provider
Final Christmas Eve, a person who had labored on dairy farms for 17 years began his first shift at a big industrial dairy operation, referred to as Woodcrest Dairy, within the New Mexico desert. However there was one thing that set him other than his coworkers: He was carrying a hidden digital camera.
Years prior, he had been a employee at a Fairlife provider farm that ARM investigated for alleged animal abuse. Disturbed by their findings, the employee reached out to the group and finally turned an ARM investigator himself.
Whereas employed at Woodcrest Dairy for 10 weeks, via early March of this 12 months, he caught dozens of acts of animal abuse on digital camera, together with employees:
- Kicking cows within the face and physique
- Forcefully jamming a capsule gun, a metallic rod used to manage treatment, down a cow’s throat
- Hitting cows within the head with a metallic pipe and enormous wrench (in accordance with the investigator, this was finished to some cows simply after they’d given delivery)
- Inserting a clamp right into a cows’ nostril and yanking on it, inflicting her to bellow in ache
- Repeatedly smacking a cow within the face with a rope
- Dragging new child calves and grownup cows within the filth with a tractor
In an interview with Vox performed by way of a translator, the investigator, who requested anonymity because of the covert nature of undercover investigations, described the therapy of cows at Woodcrest Dairy as “terrifying” and stated that the proprietor and managers witnessed it. “They solely care in regards to the cash,” he stated. “There’s no care in regards to the animals.”
“The actions noticed within the video are merciless and reprehensible,” Jim Reynolds, a veterinarian and professor emeritus of huge animal medication and welfare at Western College of Well being Sciences, advised me in an electronic mail. “The abusive and merciless actions seen within the video characterize critical issues in administration of the dairy.”
Past probably the most blatant cruelty, the investigator documented different animal welfare issues, like “downer” cows — cows unable to face or stroll on their very own, usually as a result of illness, metabolic points, or post-birth ache. Some have been lifted with a hip clamp that was positioned on their our bodies and connected to a tractor; one cow was dragged via the filth whereas connected to the tractor. One other cow had a band wrapped round her hind legs to maintain them from splaying.
As a result of cows, like all mammals, want to present delivery to provide milk, dairy farms revolve round continuous pregnancies and births, which is immensely taxing on their our bodies. The investigator documented quite a few cases of employees doing one thing through the birthing course of he had by no means seen: tying a series to the legs of child calves whereas they have been nonetheless of their moms’ delivery canals, after which leaping on it to pop the calf out. In a single scene, the cow bellows in ache and the calf is partly coated in blood.
“The cow and calf each undoubtedly suffered from this mistreatment,” Reynolds wrote to me about this a part of the investigation. “The actions seen inform us the staff are usually not educated appropriately for delivering calves, they haven’t been offered applicable tools, and they don’t seem to be managed appropriately.”
Fairlife declined an interview request for this story. In an electronic mail to Vox, the corporate stated it stopped sourcing milk from Woodcrest Dairy in 2023. Nevertheless, ARM’s investigator, in a videotaped dialog shared with Vox, requested a truck driver transporting milk from the farm in January if he was taking the milk to a close-by Fairlife plant. The driving force answered sure, specifying that they convey milk to the Fairlife plant thrice a day.
What’s flawed with dairy?
The livestock trade — not simply Fairlife — has lengthy portrayed dairy as a necessary, healthful product from cows who simply occur to be producing milk on quaint, inexperienced pastures. However cows on dairy farms, even after they’re not overtly abused like these seen in undercover investigations into Fairlife, nonetheless face extreme welfare points due to the very nature of dairy manufacturing.
In the present day’s cows have been bred to provide way more milk than they naturally would, which significantly taxes their our bodies. They’re (artificially) impregnated annually — one other bodily stressor — to induce milk manufacturing. After they provide delivery, their calves are rapidly taken away in order that people can take their moms’ milk.
New child calves are then confined alone in tiny hutches. Females go on to develop into dairy cows as soon as they’re sexually mature, whereas the male calves are dehorned and castrated — usually with out ache reduction — and offered off to develop into veal or beef.
Most dairy cows have little to no entry to pasture and spend their lives confined indoors or on filth feedlots. Naturally, they could stay to fifteen to twenty years of age, however by 5 or 6 years outdated, when our bodies give out and their milk yield wanes, they’re despatched off to slaughter.
Many of those practices have develop into commonplace on dairy farms of all sizes — not simply on mega dairies. It’s a actuality far totally different from what customers usually see in commercials and on milk bottles.
Woodcrest Dairy has since closed down and couldn’t be reached for remark. Choose Milk Producers, the cooperative that Woodcrest belonged to, advised Vox in an electronic mail that “animal care is a core worth” on the cooperative, and that it investigates “any report of inappropriate animal care.” (Choose Milk confirmed to me that Woodcrest has shut down.)
As just lately as this March, Choose Milk Producers’ web site said that the “extremely nutritious milk merchandise of fairlife come from the 99 household owned dairies of Choose Milk Producers.” That internet web page has since been taken down.
The Woodcrest Dairy findings have been the most recent in a string of comparable latest investigations. Earlier this 12 months, after ARM launched disturbing movies exhibiting animal cruelty at two Arizona dairy farms that provided Fairlife, the corporate stated it had instantly suspended ties with the farms. However weeks later, investigators from the group Client Safety Basis, separate from ARM, adopted milk being trucked from the Arizona farms to a processing plant run by United Dairymen of Arizona (a cooperative that Fairlife sources a few of its Arizona milk from), after which to a Fairlife plant. Fairlife advised Vox in an electronic mail that it didn’t resume sourcing milk from these farms.
And in 2023, ARM launched a stunning investigation into an Indiana dairy operation that ARM says belongs to the Choose Milk Producers cooperative (SMP didn’t reply to a query about whether or not the farm is at the moment a cooperative member, and the farm couldn’t be reached for remark).
Movies from the investigation present employees hitting cows with screwdrivers, knives, and sawed-off golf golf equipment, and in a single scene, a employee takes a rod with an enormous flame on the finish and brushes it in opposition to cows’ legs as they’re being milked. At one level within the video, the ARM investigator asks a supervisor a few dairy cow he had simply shot: “Do you are feeling regret for killing her?” The supervisor replies, “No! It’s why I stay on this nation, so I can kill these asshole cows.”
Fairlife denied sourcing milk from the operation. Quickly after, ARM adopted milk vehicles from the power to a Fairlife processing plant in Michigan. ARM additionally recorded a dialog with a milk truck driver who stated he took milk from the farm to the Fairlife processing plant. Fairlife said that it had been contemplating bringing on the farm as a provider and that the milk cargo ARM noticed was merely a check run that was subsequently dumped and by no means entered Fairlife’s provide chain.
The category motion lawsuit filed earlier this 12 months accuses Fairlife of mendacity about its relationship with the Arizona, Indiana, and New Mexico farms. “This conduct constitutes unhealthy religion, collusion, deception, and fraud,” the lawsuit states.
ARM has requested the US Division of Agriculture and state agriculture departments to take a deeper look into Fairlife’s provide chain and the sample of animal cruelty, however no such inquiry has ever been taken up, in accordance with Richard Couto, ARM’s founder and CEO.
Federal and state agriculture companies are “out to guard trade and {dollars},” Couto advised me. “They’re not out to guard the animal.”
Fairlife turned a uncommon success story in dairy — constructed on guarantees of doing higher
Animal Restoration Mission’s first investigation right into a Fairlife provider, launched in 2019, has since been seen over 19 million occasions — greater than maybe another farm animal cruelty video in historical past. It garnered widespread information protection, and a number of other Midwest grocery chains briefly pulled Fairlife bottles from their cabinets. Followers posted movies of themselves pouring Fairlife down the drain, vowing to by no means purchase the product once more.
By 2022, Coca-Cola, the McCloskeys, their farm enterprise, and Choose Milk Producers settled a $21 million class motion lawsuit (separate from the one filed earlier this 12 months) alleging the businesses had falsely marketed their milk as coming from humanely handled cows.
That wasn’t the way it was all purported to end up.
Within the early Nineties, the McCloskeys — who on the time owned a big dairy farm in New Mexico — launched the cooperative Choose Milk Producers, differentiated by a promise of elevated transparency and better requirements that led to more healthy cows and cleaner milk.
A number of years later, they moved to Indiana and opened Honest Oaks Farms, which is now one of many nation’s largest dairy operations, with an eye-popping 36,000 cows — what’s thought-about a mega dairy. On the time, industrial animal agriculture was beneath growing scrutiny as investigations into manufacturing unit farms by animal rights teams gained media consideration. Relatively than hunker down and ignore Large Ag’s unfavorable publicity, the McCloskeys noticed a enterprise alternative in transparency — or no less than their model of it.
In 2004, the McCloskeys expanded Honest Oaks Farms to develop into what’s been referred to as an agricultural Disneyland — a farm-meets-theme park vacationer attraction that pulls greater than 100,000 guests yearly.
“The farm was based out of necessity to counter the very loud, very well-funded, and sometimes, very deceptive voices in opposition to trendy farming and animal agriculture,” Sue McCloskey advised Meals & Wine in 2018.
In the present day, guests can take a sanitized tour of Honest Oaks’s dairy and pig operations. The programming “makes an attempt to make the general public snug with the manufacturing unit farm,” Jan Dutkiewicz, a Vox contributor and assistant professor of political science on the Pratt Institute who went on the tour, wrote in 2018. Honest Oaks, he added, deploys a “selective transparency that appears to carry out radical revelation — even because it hides overt and structural types of violence in opposition to animals.”
There are additionally interactive dairy, pork, and crop museums, a 25-foot tall mountain climbing wall within the form of a milk bottle referred to as “Udder Heights,” and a “Legen-Dairy Drop MegaSlide,” two on-site eating places, and a Marriott lodge.
All through their time at Honest Oaks Farms, guests are inundated with messages that trendy animal agriculture is sustainable and humane. “At Honest Oaks, Mike is basically in a position to create a brand new actuality,” Frerick, the ag researcher and creator, stated in The Worth of Milk, a brand new documentary sequence on the dairy trade. “They constructed one of the fashionable vacationer sights within the state of Indiana, stuffed with propaganda, to refute claims that industrial animal operations (CAFOs) have been merciless,” he advised me in an electronic mail.
But the McCloskeys’ claims about what separates their farms and companies from typical dairy manufacturing unit farms have all the time been scant on specifics.
For instance, Mike McCloskey has advised NPR that the truth that he’s fluent in Spanish has enabled him to raised talk together with his largely Spanish-speaking workforce, which has resulted in higher take care of animals. Choose Milk Producers’s web site mentions its adherence to voluntary animal welfare tips that have been developed by dairy trade teams, which largely mirror commonplace trade practices.
Honest Oaks Farms didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark for this story.
“That is simply the one basic textbook instance of why self-policing simply fails. How will you even take the corporate at their phrase now to do higher?”
— Austin Frerick, agriculture researcher and creator
After Honest Oaks Farms got here Fairlife. In 2012, the McCloskeys, via Choose Milk Producers, developed a partnership with Coca-Cola to distribute Core Energy, a milk-based protein shake made utilizing their ultra-filtration course of to boost the drink’s protein content material. Two years later, Choose Milk Producers and Coca-Cola launched the Fairlife model.
Their timing was excellent. The protein craze was gaining steam, whereas cruelty investigations into manufacturing unit farms had develop into a frequent information story. Fairlife promised customers every little thing: a low-sugar, lactose-free, high-protein milk beverage with a humane and sustainable sheen. Coca-Cola’s market dominance helped get Fairlife drinks into 76,000 US shops by 2017.
The corporate took off, and the McCloskeys turned a optimistic story in an in any other case struggling trade: Over the past 80 years per capita fluid milk consumption within the US has declined dramatically, and a whole bunch of hundreds of small- and mid-sized dairies went beneath. Giant dairy producers just like the McCloskeys have been well-positioned to learn from the trade’s structural issues.
Within the years that adopted, Mike McCloskey landed on President Donald Trump’s brief record for agriculture secretary. Sue, in the meantime, was busy on the convention and media circuit, the place she continuously, and lovingly, referred to the couple’s cows as “our women.”
“There’s a level of enterprise brilliance to them that it’s a must to admire,” Frerick stated. Neither of the McCloskeys got here from a giant farm household, but their enterprise savvy, political connections, and advertising and marketing prowess, he stated, has made them “unquestionably probably the most highly effective dairy farmers in America in a lifetime.”
We’ve develop into numb to Fairlife’s animal cruelty scandals
It wasn’t lengthy earlier than Animal Restoration Mission’s first investigation revealed how the “women” have been handled within the McCloskeys’ dairy empire.
Following ARM’s first investigation in 2019, Mike McCloskey launched an apology video, saying that Fairlife doesn’t tolerate animal abuse and would clear up its provide chain. But ever since, Animal Restoration Mission continued to launch new investigations into Fairlife suppliers and Choose Milk Producers members at an everyday clip, every with equally disturbing findings.
Alongside the best way, Fairlife eliminated humane care claims from its bottles, and earlier this 12 months, it took down a prolonged but imprecise internet web page about its animal welfare commitments.
After all, nobody on the high of those firms actively needs animals to be abused, however the continued investigations replicate a structural actuality of animal agriculture: Mass producing low-cost animal merchandise is all however inconceivable to do humanely. Dozens of investigations into the US meat, milk, and egg industries have revealed that the consistently rising demand for affordable animal merchandise — mixed with nearly zero authorized protections for farmed animals and captured regulatory companies — implies that effectivity and revenue are nearly all the time prioritized over animal welfare.
“That is simply the one basic textbook instance of why self-policing simply fails,” Frerick stated. “How will you even take the corporate at their phrase now to do higher?” The story right here, he added, “is the failure of regulators.”
By all of it, Choose Milk Producers and the McCloskeys have continued to prosper. All advised, Coca-Cola spent $7.4 billion to accumulate Fairlife, Bloomberg reported earlier this 12 months.
And the general public shock and disgust that adopted the primary investigation into Fairlife six years in the past has since largely pale into the background, whereas the model simply will get increasingly more fashionable.
“The scariest factor from all these animal abuse scandals is it seems like that, with every further scandal, the stress goes down,” Frerick stated. “This abuse is changing into seemingly a reality of life. I believe that’s sort of an unsaid technique of Fairlife — it’s simply to trip it out so [people] develop into numb to it.”
Fairlife, in any case, has all the time managed to successfully foresee and meet the cultural second. It’s now reaping the monetary rewards of a protein fad that it anticipated lengthy earlier than its rivals. And though the McCloskeys as soon as promised {that a} bottle of Fairlife got here from humanely raised cows at a time when animal welfare issues have been significantly salient, the corporate has appeared simply as joyful to quietly shed its commitments to animal welfare after they have been not handy.
However Couto stated Animal Restoration Mission isn’t going away. “ARM is such a thorn in Coca-Cola’s aspect,” he advised me, “as a result of we’re by no means going to cease investigating.”
