TruMoo is owned by Dairy Farmers of America, a national dairy cooperative made up of more than 9,500 family dairy farmers across the United States.1Dairy Farmers of America. TruMoo and Star Wars Bring Back Blue Milk for a Limited Time Nationwide DFA picked up the brand in 2020 when it bought most of Dean Foods’ assets out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and TruMoo has been a farmer-owned label ever since.
What Dairy Farmers of America Is
DFA is a cooperative, not a conventional corporation. The farmers who supply the milk also own the business and share in its earnings, with each farmer-owner getting a vote and a 48-member board of elected farmer-leaders overseeing strategy and operations.2Dairy Farmers of America. A Farmer-Owned Cooperative Governance runs from local councils up to the national board.
Cooperatives like DFA are taxed under Subchapter T of the Internal Revenue Code, which lets them return net earnings to members as patronage dividends rather than holding all profits at the corporate level.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC Subchapter T – Cooperatives and Their Patrons In practical terms, revenue from TruMoo sales flows back toward the farm families who produced the milk. The cooperative reported roughly $23 billion in 2024 revenue, making it the second-largest cooperative in the country.
How DFA Acquired TruMoo
Dean Foods launched TruMoo in 2011 as a national chocolate milk brand and grew it into one of the largest milk brands in the country by sales and volume.4CSP Daily News. TruMoover By November 2019, Dean Foods was the largest fluid milk processor in the country but was carrying crushing debt and unfunded pension obligations in a shrinking fluid milk market. It filed for Chapter 11 in the Southern District of Texas and disclosed on the same day that it was already in advanced talks with DFA about a sale of substantially all of its assets.5PR Newswire. Dean Foods Company Initiates Voluntary Reorganization with New Financial Support from Existing Lenders
DFA acted as the stalking horse bidder in the court-supervised auction, setting the floor price any competing bidder would have to beat. In March 2020, it bid $433 million for 44 of Dean Foods’ processing plants along with the associated brands and intellectual property, TruMoo included.6Federal Register. United States, et al. v. Dairy Farmers of America, Inc. and Dean Foods Company – Response to Public
A deal that size drew antitrust scrutiny. The Department of Justice sued and required DFA to divest processing plants in Harvard, Illinois; De Pere, Wisconsin; and Franklin, Massachusetts, along with associated equipment, to preserve competition in those regional fluid milk markets.7Department of Justice. Justice Department Requires Divestitures as Dean Foods Sells Fluid Milk Processing Plants to DFA With those divestitures arranged, the bankruptcy court approved the sale.
Other Brands DFA Owns
The Dean Foods deal gave DFA a wide portfolio of dairy labels beyond TruMoo. Under the same cooperative umbrella you’ll find DairyPure white milk, Borden Cheese, Friendly’s ice cream, Breakstone’s, Kemps, Mayfield Dairy Farms, and Plugrà butter, among others.8Dairy Farmers of America. Farmer-Owned Brands and Products Regional fluid milk names like Tuscan, Garelick Farms, Oak Farms, T.G. Lee, and Alta Dena also operate under DFA.9Dairy Farmers of America. Dairy Farmers of America – A Farmer-Owned Dairy Cooperative So when you pick up a carton of TruMoo, you’re buying from the same cooperative that owns much of the refrigerated dairy case around it.