Chocolate Milk for Lunch at Mansfield Middle School -- But Less Sweet

Here’s a fact that might give health-conscience parents pause: most of the milk consumed by students in school -- nationally and locally -- is chocolate flavored and sweetened.

In Mansfield, as in most other towns, the sweetener is high-fructose corn syrup.

But probably not for long.

With a little help from students and faculty at , their milk supplier, Guida’s Milk & Ice Cream, is this month introducing a new line of flavored milks sweetened with cane sugar instead of corn syrup. The new products – named Healthy Moo™ -- are, overall, slightly less sweet than the flavored milk served here now.

The New Britain-based dairy bills Healthy Moo™ as a “healthy alternative” to other flavored milk. It is intended to be part of the national initiative to limit fats, salt, and sugar in school lunches and to replace them with more nutritious choices.

The change to the reformulated milk might seem incremental to many who see childhood obesity and diabetes as one of the nation’s most serious problems. Some would like to see flavored milk banned, as was done in New Haven’s schools.

But those in the trenches say putting school lunch rooms on a white-milk-only plan can come at a heavy nutritional price.

At least one national study backed by the dairy industry says that milk consumption drops dramatically – as much as 50 percent -- at schools when flavored milk is banned.  Replacing that calcium from another source is no easy task.

Here’s the problem: Kids won’t eat what they don’t like, say the people in charge of feeding them at school. So if you want them to drink milk instead of less nutritious juice or soda, they have to like it.

That’s where Mansfield Middle School was able to help the Guida dairy, said Beth Gankofskie, Mansfield’s food service director. In mid-December of last year, she and her staff helped Guida serve two possible formulas of the Healthy Moo product to about 600 students and faculty.

One sample contained 18 grams of sucrose as a sweetener, the other 20 grams. Without knowing the difference between the two, students and teachers were asked which they preferred. They liked both, but not surprisingly, perhaps, the 20-gram formula was “the unanimous winner,” said Don Patterson, Guida’s customer service manager.

Gankofskie was not surprised, given what she knows about “the palate of Americans” and the tastes of her students. A little more than 60 percent of the milk they drink is chocolate, she said. That’s less than the national average, reported at around 70 percent.

In any event, Patterson said, the overall student reaction to Healthy Moo™ convinced the dairy that it had a product children would embrace. The students also supplied some input on the packaging.

Patterson said the new product was Guida’s response to “a shift in public opinion away from high-fructose corn syrup” and its reported relationship to the high incidence of obesity among children. He acknowledged that student milk consumption declines when flavored milk is removed from the lunch program, adding that, from his perspective as a parent, “it is better for a kid to have a flavored milk than no milk at all.”

Patterson estimated that about 70 percent of Guida’s school milk business is in the chocolate style. The dairy also has a strawberry Healthy Moo flavor and is working on a chocolate mint yet to be released.

Each 8-ounce serving of the new Healthy Moo chocolate product has a 1 percent milk fat content, contains 20 grams of sucrose and provides 140 calories, Patterson said. The company’s earlier formulation is made with 0.5 percent milk fat and contains 22 grams of high-fructose corn syrup per serving. Its overall calorie count is 130 -- slightly lower than the newer formulation.

By comparison, 8 ounces of Coca-Cola Classic contains 97 calories, but none of the calcium, protein and other nutrients found in milk. An 8-ounce serving of plain 1 percent milk has 110 calories and 12 grams of sugar in the form of lactose.