2025 Annual Scorecard
Midwest Dairy produces an annual scorecard measuring outcomes across several business and foundational goals, including increasing dairy sales, growing trust in dairy, and more.
Keep reading the 2025 Midwest Dairy Scorecard to see how your dairy checkoff investment performed.
Increasing Sales
In year two of its three-year strategic plan, Midwest Dairy sold nearly 58 million incremental pounds of milk, more than double the annual goal of 24 million. Two stand-out partnerships included activations with Chicory and Kwik Trip.
Chicory is a third-party vendor that drives sales through digital recipe inspiration. When consumers search for recipes, they see product ads based on keywords, categories, or usage occasions, and are encouraged to add products to their digital shopping carts. In 2025, Midwest Dairy’s work with Chicory resulted in 44 million incremental pounds of milk sold across four activations, such as this protein promotion.
In addition to Chicory, Midwest Dairy experienced another successful year with Kwik Trip/Kwik Star. Throughout 2025, we promoted nine limited-time offers, including seasonal favorites, resulting in nearly 1.8 million additional pounds of milk sold.
Midwest Dairy is also focused on developing new partnerships. In 2025, Midwest Dairy partnered with Scooter’s Coffee, a fast-growing drive-thru brand known for its friendly service, customizable drinks, and focus on speed and convenience. The first campaign, “Clear the List“, increased dairy sales and encouraged customers to support local teachers by rounding up their drive-thru purchases or scanning QR codes to directly contribute to teacher wish lists. The second campaign, promoting free cold foam, resulted in over 6.2 million impressions in just nine days. Building off the success of these campaigns, Midwest Dairy and Scooter’s are exploring additional dairy-forward beverage innovation in 2026.
Grow Trust
In 2025, Midwest Dairy made strong, measurable progress in growing trust across priority audiences. Sustainable nutrition managers advanced 121 thought leaders – well above the goal of 93 – with surveys showing a +43% positive shift in perception and event‑based evaluations averaging +33% improvement. Major partnerships, including the World Food Prize Foundation and the University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership, generated high‑visibility engagement. Consumer‑facing work added significant scale, generating 38.7 million impressions, reaching 8.8 million adults, and engaging 647,530 consumers, while school STEM initiatives reached 4,000+ educators and nearly 80,000 students through 18 partnerships.
Trust trends were mixed: adolescent trust rose 2% while adult trust declined, signaling an opportunity for new 2026 partnerships. Among health and wellness experts, perceptions of dairy’s environmental responsibility improved 31% from 2024 and 11% since 2023, surpassing the 3‑year goal by 8%. This work was supported by the new Wellness Warriors program and its five dietitian ambassadors in 2025.
Create Advocates
Keeping dairy farmers informed about their checkoff investment is a top priority for the Midwest Dairy Board and staff. Although Midwest Dairy fell 2% short of its 2025 goal of identifying 15% or more of dairy farmers as supporters or advocates, it made meaningful progress with dairy farmers. While the year started slowly, call volume remained strong, and more time was invested in attending meetings to connect directly with dairy farmers.
In 2025, Midwest Dairy prioritized outreach and connections with processors across our region to explore opportunities for collaboration and to leverage shared Midwest Dairy checkoff capabilities to drive value for the industry. As a result, Midwest Dairy strengthened processor connections, shared consumer insights, invited processors to consumer and partner engagements, and piloted new opportunities to convene processors and Midwest Dairy partners for win-win partnerships. Considerable progress was also made in meeting with influential decision-makers, particularly over the summer, with additional sessions held at several state fairs. While the government shutdown caused some delays, Midwest Dairy remains on track to meet this three-year goal.
Develop Leaders
Midwest Dairy remains dedicated to cultivating farm and community leaders within the dairy industry. Midwest Dairy’s goal is to empower more farmers to share their stories with consumers and prepare them for future leadership roles. In 2025, dairy farmers strengthened their skills through the Dairy Experience and Agriculture Leadership (DEAL) program, leadership grants, and webinar training on crisis and communication. Midwest Dairy also worked with young dairy leaders, reaching a total of 160 students across its 10-state region.
Advancing Research
Strong progress in research continues in year two of the strategic plan, with 45 examples of research shared with partners to support business decisions. While confidentiality limits visibility into how every insight is applied, the volume and consistency of requests, from startups to major processors, demonstrate the value and influence of dairy checkoff research. In 2025, Midwest Dairy provided partners with consumer trends, category-specific insights, and data on emerging opportunities, including enhanced milk, lactose-free innovations, and high-protein products.
Through the Midwest Dairy Foods Research Center, industry members also benefited from faculty expertise across three universities, receiving real-time guidance on product formulation, processing challenges, ingredient functionality, and pilot plant capabilities. Additional insights included custom analyses of string cheese, cottage cheese, butter color, and perceptions of sustainability. Collectively, these efforts kept Midwest Dairy on track to meet its 3-year goal of helping sales partners and processors strengthen decision-making through research-driven insights.
Enhance Culture
Employee engagement is a critical driver of organizational performance, directly influencing our ability to achieve strategic goals. Research consistently demonstrates that higher engagement levels are strongly correlated with improved business outcomes, including productivity, retention, and overall effectiveness.
In 2025, we achieved an engagement score of 4.09—an increase from the previous year—signaling meaningful progress and positive momentum as we transition into our next three-year strategic plan.
As part of our continued effort to refine how we measure and strengthen our culture, we are evolving our approach to engagement assessment. Beginning in 2026, we will transition away from the Q12 assessment to ensure our measurement strategy remains aligned with organizational priorities and provides the most actionable insights.