For the Love of Milk

Ingo Müller peers at the trans­par­ent pack­ag­ing on the prod­uct in his hand. “This cheese is so fresh it looks like it was sliced just five min­utes ago,” he remarks. Dressed in jeans and a hood­ie, he stands in front of the long, glass-cov­ered, refrig­er­at­ed shelves of a mod­ern Rewe super­mar­ket in the Mühlen dis­trict of the north­ern Ger­man city of Bre­men. We’re not far from the North Sea coast­line. The Hanseat­ic city is sur­round­ed by flat, fer­tile land with lush fields on which cows are hap­pi­ly graz­ing. This is noth­ing new to Müller, who grew up on his par­ents‘ farm. And loved it. He has always been fond of cows, and they of him. Today, Müller is the CEO of one of Europe’s largest dairy enter­pris­es — “for the love of milk,” he says. And out of sol­i­dar­i­ty with farm­ers. Some 4,700 mem­ber farms are the joint own­ers of the coop­er­a­tive enter­prise known as DMK Deutsches Milchkon­tor GmbH, and Mil­ram is the best-known brand of this spe­cial­ized food producer.

A meet­ing with Porsche Con­sult­ing Mag­a­zine? That’s fine with Müller. “But let’s meet where the prod­ucts are: at a store instead of the air­port office. Prefer­ably early in the morn­ing.” He arrives in a superb mood, full of ener­gy, and with­out a trace of exec­u­tive pos­tur­ing. He rolls up his sleeves and fills his shop­ping cart for the magazine’s pho­tog­ra­ph­er. Fruit, veg­eta­bles, and dairy prod­ucts of his own make, of course. He prompt­ly shows off an inno­va­tion: “The new cov­ers of our yogurt con­tain­ers are thin­ner and stronger than what we had before,” he says.

Müller is curi­ous. As the spokesper­son for the man­age­ment board, he wants to know about the qual­i­ty of his company’s and his com­peti­tors’ retail prod­ucts. What items are new on the shelves? Is his company’s pack­ag­ing the most recy­clable? Can the pre­sen­ta­tion be improved? Germany’s largest dairy coop­er­a­tive embraces qual­i­ty — in all areas of the com­pa­ny from pro­duc­tion, pro­cess­ing, stor­age, and trans­port to how the prod­ucts are dis­played in the refrig­er­at­ed cases of retail shops. As he puts it, “What’s on the shelves is what counts. Qual­i­ty is non-negotiable.”

Müller’s col­league Dr. Mar­cus Krapp is respon­si­ble for over­all qual­i­ty at DMK. Glob­al Head of Qual­i­ty is his offi­cial title. Müller asked him to meet us at the super­mar­ket too. “Our cus­tomers’ sat­is­fac­tion is our high­est pri­or­i­ty,” says Dr. Krapp. “We always want to meet their expec­ta­tions for our prod­ucts.” DMK has there­fore drawn up a qual­i­ty strat­e­gy as part of its Vision 2030. In doing so, the coop­er­a­tive solicit­ed advice and guid­ance from a spe­cial­ized team at Porsche Con­sult­ing.

Farm­ers feed the pop­u­la­tion. Sta­tis­tics show that a sin­gle farmer in Ger­many pro­vides food for an aver­age of 139 peo­ple. That fig­ure has tripled since 1960. One food prod­uct that has always played a key role is milk. How­ev­er, con­sumer behav­ior and pur­chas­ing pat­terns have changed over the past decades. The spot­light now is on con­ve­nience. Cus­tomers seek ease and sim­plic­i­ty in their lives, ready-to-use items in small amounts and pack­ages. “But that con­flicts with the idea of sus­tain­abil­i­ty,” observes Müller. “And sus­tain­abil­i­ty is play­ing a big role right now in dis­cus­sions about food. A lot more will be hap­pen­ing with pack­ag­ing in the future.”

It seems bizarre to accuse the entire farm­ing sec­tor of being harm­ful to the cli­mate. “For one thing, farm­ers are aware of their respon­si­bil­i­ty for the envi­ron­ment,” says Müller. “More­over, they are the ones who pro­duce the ‘means of life’ (the lit­er­al mean­ing of the Ger­man word for ‘food’).” A sec­ond source of ten­sion is the split between strug­gling to keep food prices down while desir­ing high lev­els of food qual­i­ty. By way of back­ground: in the 1950s and 1960s, res­i­dents of the Fed­er­al Repub­lic of Ger­many had to spend about 50 per­cent of their income on food, where­as today that fig­ure is only around 10 per­cent. “And qual­i­ty has risen at the same time. We’ve never had such high-grade and healthy food prod­ucts in our shops as we do today,” says Müller. “These improve­ments have to be paid for. Qual­i­ty has its price. That applies to organ­ic prod­ucts as well. If it’s no longer prof­itable to pro­duce them, or if most of the pop­u­la­tion isn’t will­ing to pay extra for them, then farm­ers won’t be invest­ing in them anymore.”

As the head of a coop­er­a­tive food-pro­duc­ing enter­prise, Müller also finds him­self nav­i­gat­ing the cross-cur­rents of con­ven­tion­al dairy prod­ucts ver­sus vegan alter­na­tives. Con­sumer eat­ing habits have changed. The per­cent­age of peo­ple who are flex­i­tar­i­an, pri­or­i­tize plant prod­ucts, or are entire­ly vegan will con­tin­ue to rise by 2030. “As food pro­duc­ers we can’t say that’s a bad idea and we won’t go along with it,” says Müller. Quite the oppo­site, in fact: the dairy has the nec­es­sary exper­tise for alter­na­tive prod­ucts as well. In the long term, the aim is for farm­ers to be able to par­tic­i­pate in inno­va­tions as raw mate­r­i­al sup­pli­ers. But it is also clear,” Müller remarks, “that we are a dairy and will remain so.”

As CEO of the DMK Group, Müller there­fore needs to bal­ance dif­fer­ent inter­ests. He seeks to address the many and often con­flict­ing demands on his posi­tion by “com­mu­ni­cat­ing eye to eye.” As he explains, “Inter­act­ing with peo­ple as peo­ple, whether they’re clean­ing per­son­nel or com­pa­ny direc­tors — that’s what’s impor­tant to me. And I want feed­back. I want to hear if some­thing isn’t work­ing or if some­one finds some­thing dis­turb­ing.” This open ear for crit­i­cism is a qual­i­ty Müller also expects from his man­age­ment per­son­nel. “We’ve mod­i­fied our struc­tures to pro­mote this. When a qual­i­ty assur­ance engi­neer speaks up, for exam­ple, we’re now pay­ing the clos­est atten­tion.” Müller is con­vinced that this type of cor­po­rate cul­ture “enhances the qual­i­ty of our prod­ucts.” And that is the focus of the DMK Group’s vision for the future. “As food pro­duc­ers we bear a great respon­si­bil­i­ty. You can’t live up to that by fol­low­ing stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures alone. Instead, every employ­ee has to like their work and be in a posi­tion to do their very best to improve qual­i­ty. And you’ll only achieve that if qual­i­ty is the top pri­or­i­ty through­out the entire com­pa­ny, if you deal with peo­ple on an equal foot­ing, and take them on board.” One exam­ple is DMK’s qual­i­ty strat­e­gy. “It strength­ens an entre­pre­neur­ial approach that pro­motes a pre­ven­tive man­age­ment sys­tem for assess­ing risks,” says Dr. Krapp. He has linked the strat­e­gy with a com­pre­hen­sive con­tin­u­ous improve­ment project that close­ly observes pro­duc­tion process­es and uses an array of sen­sors on machin­ery to gath­er even more rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion in real time about the milk, cheese, and curd.

As mem­bers of the coop­er­a­tive, the farm­ers also place a pre­mi­um on qual­i­ty. As Krapp notes, “Our agri­cul­tur­al depart­ment main­tains close con­tact with our farm­ers. We offer work­shops, fur­ther train­ing, and infor­ma­tion. In the rare cases when qual­i­ty prob­lems arise, we go straight to the pro­duc­er to dis­cuss the caus­es and cor­rec­tive mea­sures.” He is quick to empha­size that since 2021, DMK has ben­e­fit­ed espe­cial­ly from Porsche Consulting’s expe­ri­ence and exper­tise in process and cost opti­miza­tion and in the fur­ther devel­op­ment of qual­i­ty man­age­ment sys­tems. “We have prof­it­ed from Porsche Consulting’s 25 years of expe­ri­ence in the food sec­tor. It gives us a bench­mark­ing frame­work that helps us improve all the more.” The experts at Porsche Con­sult­ing enjoy “absolute recog­ni­tion and respect” among DMK’s employ­ees. One rea­son for this, accord­ing to Krapp, “is that they don’t just pro­vide ideas in the­o­ry, but are also and espe­cial­ly involved in guid­ing the steps to put them into practice.”

With a view to the future, Müller has the fol­low­ing to say: “We want to keep pro­vid­ing out­stand­ing prod­ucts over both the short and long term, while also keep­ing an eye on pro­duc­tion costs. To do that, we have to keep think­ing about what else we can opti­mize, what we can do more effi­cient­ly, and what lab­o­ra­to­ry analy­ses we can run to get results that help us improve even more.” Müller makes sure that suc­cess in dif­fer­ent areas is mea­sured. “Cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion has risen and our qual­i­ty costs have declined,” he notes. When the inter­view is over and we’re about to depart, he turns one last time and says, “Milk is my pas­sion — and has been so my entire life.”