I will preface this by saying that, while I don't necessarily fully agree with the arguments for having chocolate milk in schools, I generally understand them. As such, the baseline for this idea is the assumption that chocolate milk is going to stay. I would also imagine that most of us would agree that, given the choice, white milk is a much better option.

I was recently having lunch with my daughter and her first grade classmates at Wheeler (Go Wildcats!). While we were approaching the milk cooler I noticed a small buzz building in the kids. Once I got to the milk cooler I saw that the kids were fishing through the chocolate milk to find the carton with a new joke on it. I thought, "hmm, I'll grab a white milk and read them the joke from there." I was surprised however, to find that the white milk had nothing fun on it for the kids at all, just the boring nutrition content and other standard labeling. Once we were at the table, the discussion on the jokes continued for quite some time. While it was fun to learn that an astronaut's favorite sandwich is "launch-meat" I was also discouraged to realize that we were incentivizing our children to make the less healthy choice.

I have a hard time imagining that anyone in the MPS family would benefit from incentivizing the children to drink chocolate milk and that the choice to put the fun packaging on the less healthy option was one from either the milk manufacturer or distributor. I would ask that someone look into the situation and find out if we can reverse the current situation by purchasing white milk with fun labeling and chocolate milk with plain labeling. With enough pressure I am certain that the distributor and/or manufacturer could accommodate this simple request.