A veterinarian, a dairy farmer, an Indiana farm and an idea borrowed from water treatment.

fairlife is an American brand of filtered milk and milk-based drinks, written in lowercase and owned today by The Coca-Cola Company. Its story begins on a dairy farm. Progressive Dairy, reporting in March 2019 on a talk given by the brand’s team at a dairy symposium in Woodstock, Ontario, named the founders of the brand as Mike McCloskey, a veterinarian, and his wife Sue McCloskey, who shared an interest in dairy cattle and in the relationship between dairy producers and their cows. The couple started a farm of their own and called it Fair Oaks Farm.

The McCloskeys also organised other farmers. Progressive Dairy reported that in 1994 they started a cooperative, Select Milk Producers Inc. The idea behind fairlife, the magazine said, came from an accident. When the well that supplied water to the cows caved in, the McCloskeys had to install a reverse-osmosis filtration system to keep producing milk of the same quality. Intrigued by the filters, they began to wonder about filtering the milk itself: separating it into its components and then adding those components back at different levels to create a new product that still tasted good.

In Progressive Dairy’s account, the components are separated by size and recombined according to different recipes, one recipe for each product. The magazine quoted Sue McCloskey, speaking in a company video, describing fairlife as “a culmination of everything we’ve done”, a brand that in her words is about care for cows, for the environment, for the safety of the product and for the people who work on the farms. Jacqueline McCloskey, the couple’s daughter, joined the brand’s team on stage at the Ontario symposium.

A partner arrived in 2012. Progressive Dairy reported that in 2012 Coca-Cola partnered with Select Milk Producers, and Adweek wrote in December 2016 that the cooperative had entered into a partnership with Coca-Cola in 2012 to produce and distribute the ultra-filtered milk. fairlife’s chief executive Tim Doelman, quoted by Dairy Industries International in January 2020, said: “We set out in 2012 to harness the power and nutrition of dairy.” According to that report, the company began with a protein shake called Core Power, and its filtered milk followed in 2014.

The milk reached shelves in the Midwest. Business Insider reported in November 2014 that fairlife had launched in Minnesota in February of that year, with a video that starred Sue McCloskey explaining the product to local shoppers, ahead of a planned nationwide rollout. Coca-Cola’s North American president, Sandy Douglas, told an investor conference that month that the company would be investing in the milk business to build the brand, and that it would not “rain money” in the early years.

A joint venture, full ownership by Coca-Cola, plants in four states and a dairy in Ontario.

For its early years fairlife was a joint venture between the McCloskeys’ cooperative and Coca-Cola. That changed at the start of 2020. Dairy Industries International reported on 13 January 2020 that The Coca-Cola Company had acquired the remaining stake in fairlife LLC from its joint-venture partner, Select Milk Producers, and now owned the whole company. Financial terms were not disclosed. fairlife’s own announcement, dated 3 January 2020, said the brand was “now fully part of the Coca-Cola family”. Coca-Cola has owned fairlife outright since that January.

The brand kept its own address. Dairy Industries International said fairlife would continue to operate as a stand-alone business based in Chicago, and that its products were distributed through the Minute Maid distribution system as well as by Coca-Cola bottlers across the United States. Doelman said in the same report that the company’s product lines would “continue to grow and improve with the strength and scale of The Coca-Cola Company.”

Production has spread across several sites. The January 2020 report placed fairlife’s production in Coopersville, Michigan, and Waco, Texas, with a new facility under construction in Goodyear, Arizona. Capital Press reported on 18 March 2021 that the Chicago-based company, which it described as a unit of Coca-Cola, had opened the Goodyear production and distribution facility. Neil Betteridge, fairlife’s senior vice president of global manufacturing, said cases were rolling off the line there, and the company said it had partnered with United Dairymen of Arizona to buy milk from dairy farmers in the West Valley.

The brand also crossed the border. Progressive Dairy reported in March 2019 that fairlife had launched in Canada using American milk ahead of the opening of its own plant, and that it was building a processing plant in Peterborough, Ontario, where Coca-Cola’s Minute Maid business had long operated. Carolyn Novick, director of fairlife for The Minute Maid Company in Canada, told the Ontario symposium that local processing with Canadian milk was planned for spring 2020, after the company had worked with Dairy Farmers of Ontario to learn how the province sources fluid milk. Dairy Industries International dated the Canadian launch to 2018.

The brand’s link to its founders’ farm drew scrutiny in 2019: NBC Chicago reported on 5 June 2019 that Fair Oaks Farms had fired employees seen in an undercover video released by the group Animal Recovery Mission, and that Coca-Cola said it was in talks to discontinue sourcing from the farm involved.

Design and documentation.

Eggs and fluid milk are among the plainest things in a grocery basket, and that plainness shapes how their packaging works. An egg carton has to protect a fragile product, stack in a chilled case and still tell a shopper at a glance what kind of eggs sit inside, so its lid, its colour and the words printed on it do most of the brand’s work. A milk jug or carton has a similar job: it has to be recognised quickly on a crowded shelf, often by a cap colour or a band of type, before anyone reads the small print.

Because the products inside can look alike from one name to the next, the brands in this group lean on labels, logos, carton shapes and advertising to set themselves apart. Some of the names belong to farmer-owned cooperatives, some to family companies and some to much larger food groups, and the name on the front does not always say which.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its eggs or milk are packed and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A lowercase name, a nod to the gable top, ribs like ripples and a sleeve over the whole bottle.

The name is part of the design. fairlife writes itself entirely in lowercase, and English Wikipedia notes that it is stylised in the logo with an exclamation mark in place of the letter i, as fa!rlife. The container received as much attention as the name. Plastics News reported in May 2016, from a talk at the Packaging Conference in Henderson, Nevada, that fairlife did not want “just another” gable-top carton or plastic jug for its milk. Its bottle was developed with the brand strategy and design firm Kaleidoscope of Chicago and the PET bottle specialists Plastic Technologies Inc. of Holland, Ohio.

According to Plastics News, the bottle gives a nod to the gable top, so that shoppers still read it as milk, while its larger size carries ribs that mimic ripples and add stacking strength. A full-sleeve label wraps the bottle, designed both to stand out on the shelf and to shield the milk from light. Then-chief executive Steve Jones told the conference that milk was treated as a commodity and that there had been little innovation in its packaging since the gable-top box. “If you put the same old packaging out, no one is going to notice,” he said, adding that the shape of the bottle was critical to getting people to reconsider the product.

The designers described their aims in similar terms. Bryan Shova, industrial design director at Kaleidoscope, said the team wanted “a structure that honors milk” while answering the question of how this milk was different. Alex Weber, Kaleidoscope’s senior creative director, said the packaging was critical to the marketing conversation fairlife wanted to have with its customers. Jones told the conference that the company had already reduced the number of layers in the sleeve from the original design and might make the bottle lighter in future.

Advertising arrived early. Business Insider reported in November 2014 that fairlife’s print and poster advertising in its Minnesota launch market had been created by fairlife itself rather than led by Coca-Cola. Adweek reported on 13 December 2016 that the Illinois agency Condon & Root had initially worked on the brand, and that fairlife had picked Doner, from its Detroit office, as creative and strategic agency of record after a review, with its opening campaign set for spring 2017. The same report said digital ads featuring the University of Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh had been made by Onion Labs, and that Alison + Partners and Starcom were the brand’s PR and media agencies. Jones, quoted by Adweek, said Doner saw the world the same way fairlife did.

For a design guide, fairlife shows how a commodity product can be reframed through structure: a lowercase name, a bottle that recalls the gable top without copying it, ribs that read as ripples and a sleeve that turns the whole container into a label. Compare it with Minute Maid, the Coca-Cola juice brand whose distribution system carries fairlife, and Lactaid, another American lactose-free milk brand. For this guide we use filter blue, sky blue, milk white and gable cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep fairlife’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.