What is single-origin milk? The new dairy trend, explained - Produce Awards

Jul 21, 2026

Rich, creamy and entirely unique. This is what real dairy tastes like.

You’ve heard of single-origin coffee and single-origin chocolate. You’re probably less likely to have heard of single-origin milk. But once you’ve tasted it, you’ll likely wonder why you didn’t make the switch sooner.

What is single-origin milk?

Simply put, single-origin milk comes from one specific farm, or even one specific herd of cows. Sometimes known as single-source milk, it offers complete traceability from pasture to bottle, delivering a premium product that comes with its own unique taste of place and time.

Schulz Organic Dairy Farm — Schulz dairy cows enjoy a multi-species diet.

How is single-origin milk different from regular milk?

Standard commercially produced milk is mass-blended. Milk from hundreds of different farms and thousands of different cows is pooled together in giant tankers and processed at a central plant.

You might never have thought about the fact that the milk you get from the supermarket always tastes exactly the same. This is done on purpose. Processors ‘standardise’ every batch, adjusting the fat and protein levels in each so that they’re always identical. The milk is also heavily pasteurised (heat-treated) and homogenised (mechanically processed under high pressure to break down fat globules into tiny particles) to keep the fat from separating and forming that lovely cream top older folk like me might remember from the milk bottles of our childhoods. Mass-produced milk also has to go through long supply chains, which means that it’s usually around 3-5 days old by the time it hits the shelf.

Single-origin milk has a far more distinct and ever-changing flavour. The flavour changes based on the cows’ specific diet, the soil, the region and, of course, the season.

Schulz Organic Dairy: milk the way it used to be

In Victoria, if you see a bottle of Schulz Organic Dairy milk on the shelf – grab it. This third-generation dairy farm produces the kind of full-cream milk that will make your eyes pop – it’s rich, it’s creamy, and it has a delectably smooth mouthfeel.

The Schulz family – currently National Finalists in the 2026 delicious. Harvey Norman Produce Awards – produce their single-origin, unhomogenised full-cream organic milk and other small-batch dairy products at the family farm and on-site dairy in Timboon in south-west Victoria. It’s all thanks to a happy and healthy herd of Friesian and Jersey cows, which graze on multi-species, regeneratively farmed pastures. And right now, these girls are giving milk with a lovely high fat concentration, which means a creamier cup of coffee for you.

“What the big factories do is they standardise the fat percentage – not what the farmer or the cow gave, but they’ll make it, say, 3.5 percent,” explains Simon Schulz, who founded the Schulz Organic Dairy brand in 2006. “Whereas, one of the things that we do, we don’t standardise. At the moment, the cows are producing milk and it’s 5.03% fat. And that’s exactly what our customers get in the bottle.”

In spring, when everything is blooming and there is a lot more sugar in the grasses, the milk tastes sweeter. In autumn, when there’s less pasture and the cows start eating more silage, the milk takes on a richer texture.

Supermarket milk — Ever wondered why your supermarket milk always tastes exactly the same?

The cream of the crop

The fact that Schulz milk is unhomogenised has left a few customers a tad confused. One who came across the thick cream on top – a sight you would rarely see in a regular supermarket bottle of milk these days – believed the milk to be ‘off’ and returned it.

“It was so foreign to them that the cream naturally rises to the top,” Schulz says. “So we make a lot of effort to educate people that our milk is different – our milk is natural, our milk is organic. We don’t standardise, we don’t homogenise. We’re using very low-temperature pasteurisation, where we emphasise flavour over speed or efficiency.

“When you’re a small brand like us, we need to differentiate ourselves from everyone else in the market. And so if everyone else goes for efficiency and speed and convenience, we’re going to go for flavour.”

Schulz Organic Dairy Farm reusable bottles — The reusable milk bottles aim to help cut down on plastic waste.

Related story: What does ‘free range’ really mean?

More taste, less waste

Another concept many might not be familiar with – but older Australians will remember – is the returnable glass milk bottle. After first introducing the concept (and selling out) at farmers’ markets in 2017, Schulz now sells returnable, reusable 1L glass milk bottles at retailers across Victoria, with the aim to help cut down on the 48,000 tonnes of plastic waste produced from the 2 billion-plus litres of milk Australians drink each year. On July 1 of this year, they finally reached their goal of making the switch to Australian-made glass bottles.

“We partnered with Orora [glass bottle manufacturer in South Australia] to create, rather than a Schulz bottle, an industry bottle so that we can try and encourage other manufacturers. It doesn’t have to be in dairy – it could be in juice, it can be in pasta sauces, so that everyone can reuse and refill their glass bottles.”