UK dairy Robert Wiseman Dairies will cut the price it pays to its farmer-suppliers by 2.2 pence a litre from the beginning of next month.

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The decrease will take the price Wiseman offers farmers to 25.02p per litre from 1 February, the company said.


“The drop in the price of cream on the commodities market has been the main driving force behind our need to cut prices,” a spokesperson for the dairy told just-food today (27 January).


Since September 2007, the value of cream has fallen by 3.27p on each litre of milk bought by the company, Wiseman revealed. The price of cream has dropped from GBP1,400 (US$1,977) per tonne in 2007 to GBP800 per tonne now.


“We held off for as long as possible, hoping cream value would return to previous levels,” the spokesperson said.

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“We hope that the commodity price of cream has now stabilised, but we continue to be exposed to the volatility of the commodities markets…. When the price of cream does rise again we anticipate passing that back to milk producers.”


However, the news is a further blow for UK dairy farmers following farm-gate price cuts from Arla Foods and First Milk.


A spokesperson for the National Farmers’ Union told just-food that the news was “very disappointing”.


NFU dairy board chairman Gwyn Jones said: “Clearly this is very disappointing, but not wholly unexpected in an industry where one milk buyer still follows another’s lead. What is concerning is the magnitude of the price cut, which is larger than any other cut and difficult to reconcile for a liquid milk buyer.”