PROVO — Thanks to a BYU student's new Web site, you can now learn whether your butter was churned in Idaho, your sour cream curdled in Pennsylvania and your milk milked in Utah.
BYU senior Trevor Fitzgerald created whereismymilkfrom.com because he noticed many of us are interested in knowing where food comes from and how we can buy local products.
"I'm interested in the dairy industry, interested in food traceability," the information systems major said. "I've also never seen anyone do (this) before."
The information comes from the FDA's interstate milk shippers list, public information not easily accessible for the average consumer.
So, he boiled the information down to a searchable database that allows anyone to type in the manufacturing-plant code found on nearly every dairy item to find the product's home.
The buying-local trend is "definitely gaining momentum," said Bob Smith, vice president of business development for Winder Farms, formerly Winder Dairy, in West Valley City, which has been selling Utah milk for 130 years.
"In the past, people were always concerned with quality, but now they're adding in some of the other factors: Is it local? Is it (a business that's) friendly for the environment?" Smith said. "People look at it as far as helping the community. Buying local makes you part of the community."
On dairy products, Utah's code is 49, followed by the individual plant codes. For example, Cream-O-Weber is 49-10, and Gossner Foods is 49-301.
These codes can be found on the bottoms, sides or lids of products and always start with a two-digit number. For more help finding the codes, visit whereismymilkfrom.com.
Most local grocery stores carry Utah-made milk, Fitzgerald said, but when he typed in codes from Costco milk, he learned it was trucked in from Bozeman, Mont.
Some Utah stores even get yogurt from as far away as California and Tennessee, he said.
Becky Low, a nutritionist with the Dairy Council of Utah and Nevada, stressed that all milk is safe, whether it's coming from down the street or across the country.
For Fitzgerald, the most surprising discovery was that despite different names, a lot of milk on the shelves comes from the same place.
"When you look at them, they appear to be different brands ... two different qualities of milk," he said. "But then you punch in the code on each one and they all come from the same place. Now I laugh when I see people buying more expensive milk, because I know that it's the exact same milk."
When Fitzgerald graduates, he'd love to use his computer experience to get the agricultural industry more technologically up-to-date, he said.
That, and own a 30,000-cow dairy farm.
"I'm a city kid," he said. "I've been in big cities my whole life, except for six months of my mission when I lived in a farm town in Minnesota. I think it would be awesome."
e-mail: sisraelsen@desnews.com