The Century-Old Dairy Producer Behind Aldi's Friendly Farms Milk In The Midwest

Have you noticed the milk at a Midwest Aldi is a dollar or two cheaper than anywhere else? Like many of the products at the affordable grocery chain, Aldi's milk is sold under a private label (Friendly Farms) which provides an alternative to higher-priced brands. Aldi is famous for its dupes, many of which are better than name brands, but you may be surprised to know which company is producing milk for Aldi under the Friendly Farms brand.

If you shop at Aldi in the Midwest, you may be buying milk from a company that's already familiar to you — a Minnesota company called Kemps. Don't be surprised if that name rings a bell. You'll find Kemps milk everywhere, from Target and Walmart to roadside convenience stores. Kemps is one of America's top dairy producers, a company that does more than $800 million in business every year, with half of that revenue coming from milk production. Some of that milk goes to stores across the Midwest to be sold under the Kemps brand, but that same milk is sold at Aldi under the in-house brand, Friendly Farms. So, whether you pay $5.12 for a gallon of Kemps milk at Walmart or $3.95 for the Aldi version, the milk comes from the same place.

Kemps didn't start out producing all things dairy, like the company does today. The beginning of Kemps is instead rooted in the founding of a Minneapolis ice cream shop in 1914. Called Lathrop-Kemps Ice Cream Company, the shop billed its ice cream in early advertising as a "wholesome article of food, rich in cell-building proteids." (Proteids is an old-fashioned way of saying protein.) The shop sold ice cream and sherbets (yes, there is a difference) and two years later the Lathrop-Kemps Ice Cream plant was producing 260 gallons of ice cream every hour. The company changed hands over the years and weathered both the Great Depression and World War II before becoming Marigold Foods in a 1961 merger. Marigold Foods changed its name to Kemps in 2002. Then in 2011, the dairy cooperative Dairy Farmers of America bought the company. That meant real American farmers were invested in the brand.

Today, you'll mostly find Kemps products in the Midwest, but the inventory has expanded well beyond ice cream and sherbet. Alongside the millions of gallons of milk that Kemps produces in its factories, the brand makes other dairy products like a frozen yogurt (but really, is frozen yogurt healthier than ice cream?), cottage cheese, yogurt, and novelties like ice cream sandwiches and premade ice cream cones.