Episode 40 – Revitalizing the Dairy Aisle: How ADANE Boosts Sales & Strengthens Retail Partnerships

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25 min read 8/13/2025

In this inaugural Regional Rundown segment of the Your Dairy Checkoff Podcast, DMI’s Theresa Reps is joined by Nick DePalma and Kim Villani from the American Dairy Association Northeast (ADANE) to spotlight their impactful work with retailers. They discuss two major initiatives – the Dairy Aisle Performance Program and the Dairy Aisle Reinvention Program – and how these efforts drive sales, improve product availability and create better shopping experiences for consumers. From tackling out-of-stock challenges and enhancing dairy case hygiene to using data-driven insights to expand dairy shelf space, Nick and Kim share how these programs help prioritize milk and dairy products in more than 40 retail chains across the Northeast. Farmers will also hear how these strong retailer relationships benefit their bottom line and how consumer trends like protein snacking and local farm storytelling are shaping dairy’s future in stores.

Tune in to learn more!

Host & Guest

  • Host: Theresa Reps, Director of Farmer Outreach, Dairy Management Inc.
  • Guest: Nick Depalma, Vice President of Retail Services, American Dairy Association North East
  • Guest: Kim Villani, Senior Director of Retail Services, American Dairy Association North East

Transcript (AI-Generated, please ignore typos)

Your Dairy Checkoff Podcast 00:02

Welcome to your Dairy Checkoff podcast from dairy management Inc, where Dairy Checkoff leaders and farmers share real stories, strategies and insights that grow sales and build trust for us dairy, let's get started.

 

Theresa Reps 00:20

Hi everyone. I'm Theresa Reps, and I'm excited to serve as your host today for a new segment of the your dairy check off podcast called The Regional rundown. This segment is going to focus on our state and regional organizations and showcase the work that they're doing on behalf of farmers at the local level. So for our first regional rundown segment. We've got two guests joining us from American Dairy Association, northeast. American Dairy Association, northeast covers farmers from New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. Today, we've got Nick and Kim joining us to talk through their work with retailers and what they've done in the retail space. So Nick, please give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself and your work at American Dairy Association northeast.

 

Nick DePalma 01:06

Yeah, I am been with American Dairy Association northeast. Now for 30 years, I've always worked in the retail program. I am now the vice president of the retail program. I work with a great bunch of people who do extensive work in retail, supermarkets, convenience stores and independent stores, and our goal is just to constantly increase dairy sales at that level.

 

Theresa Reps 01:36

Awesome. Thanks. Nick, Kim, I'll turn it over to you to introduce yourself.

 

Theresa Reps 01:41

So Kim, tell us a little bit more about the dairy aisle Improvement Program and how that got started.

 

Kim Villani 01:41

Sure. So our dairy aisle performance program began, initially in 2001 as a combined effort with Cornell University and American Dairy Association. And really what we do is we go into the stores. We're looking at five key areas within the store. We look at the hygiene of the stores, the temperature, making sure that the product is always fresh for our customers, we want to check the stock levels and figuring out what is causing an out of stock issue. Is it a true out of stock where they've just completely sold out of the product? Is it a not on show so it's sitting in the back room waiting for someone to replenish it? Is it UNsupplied? So there's either a manufacturing issue with that product or maybe there's an issue with it coming from a retailer's warehouse. So really we want to go into the stores, evaluate them, find out what their issues are, and really work with them to change their prioritization of milk and dairy products as a

 

Theresa Reps 01:41

whole. So Kim, tell us a little bit more about the program and what it looks like today from where you started.

 

Kim Villani 01:41

Sure. So today, we're really working hand in hand with our other retail objectives too, but our primary focus has always been and will continue to be, focusing on changing the culture within the dairy department and making sure that the dairy staff are prioritizing the handling of milk, so making sure that products are presented in a clean manner, that the case is fresh, with temperature being controlled between 33 and 38 degrees to maintain optimal co date life for our products, and making sure that the products are in stock, because If the product isn't in stock, then the customer can't purchase it, and that at the end of the day, is our ultimate goal by increasing sales and also merchandising the product, making sure that the product is available, that it is allocated correctly based upon sales trends, that the product is rotated, so that The longest code life is always available to customers.

 

Theresa Reps 01:41

So tell us a little bit more about some of the retail partners that you work with.

 

Kim Villani 01:41

So we work with over 40 retailers for our area performance program. Our marketing area is pretty expansive. We have over 125,000 square miles within our area of coverage, and we have several major metropolitan cities within our coverage area, like Philadelphia, New York City, Baltimore, DC, Pittsburgh. So we want to make sure that we're working with the retailers with the highest volume for dairy sales. Some of those retailers would be shopper. White Walmart, Safeway, Acme tops and Price Chopper, as well as wise and giant eagle,

 

Kim Villani 01:41

Hi, I'm Kim Villani. I'm the Senior Director of retail services, and for 23 years, I've been managing the operations as well as the technology for our dairy aisle performance program, which is an in store assessment program that we do at the store level with retailers in our marketing area. And we go in and we're checking on a variety of different issues that may be present in the dairy aisle and trying to correct those, as well as advocates for the proactive handling of milk products for our dairy farmers.

 

Theresa Reps 01:44

great. So what are, what are some of the successes that you've seen with this dairy aisle performance program?

 

Kim Villani 05:15

Over the course of 23 years, there's been a lot of successes our work to overcome stock issues. Labor is a major issue going on amongst every facet of our life these days, but in particular in retail. You know, stores are really struggling with labor, so working with them to make sure that the product is always available and on the shelf is very key. We have worked with space gains for our products, and what that looks like is it kind of helps in a two fold scenario. So gaining space for milk based upon the sales trends will also help to overcome stock levels. So one of the retailers we work with last year, we were able to show them that they were really falling behind on their space for fluid milk, and they were also having an increased amount of out of stocks, so we were able to work with them to expand their shelf capacity, to have two days worth of supply on their shelves, so that that helped with that replenishment that they were really struggling with.

 

Theresa Reps 06:15

For those of us that aren't, you know as familiar with the retail space, how did you discover out of stock issues? Or, you know, what does an out of stock issue mean?

 

Kim Villani 06:26

So we have our own proprietary software for our dairy aisleperformance program. So I have a team of seven individuals who are going into stores, and they're looking at, you know, where are the holes in the dairy case and what is causing that, you know, void in the on the shelf or product. So we work with our dairy managers at store level very closely. We work with store managers. We work with the dairy category buyers at a retail headquarters level as well. And what we do is, when we're in the store, we're documenting on a UPC level, what product is out of stock? Which, if it's a true out of stock, that product has been ordered, it's been delivered correctly. It's just been sold out through purchases by consumers. If there's what we consider to be a not on show, that product is sitting in the back room and waiting for store staff to replenish it onto the shelves. If it's an UNsupplied product, we are no we know through our conversations with the dairy managers that either they order the product and it wasn't received or there's a an issue with it being manufactured at the you know, processor level. So by us collecting that information in our stores, we're able to document trends. You know, is it just one store that's having this issue? Is it multiple stores within a retailer, or is it multiple retailers within our market who are all having the similar issue? So when we gather that information and our system turns it into reports, we're able to talk with our dairy category buyers and evaluate, you know, what their sales are like for a product, and do they have enough space for that product on their shelves so we can identify, you know, trends with these stocks not being, you know, available to consumers to purchase

 

Theresa Reps 08:19

Kim beyond stock levels. What are some other things that the dairy aisle performance program addresses with retailers?

 

Kim Villani 08:27

So a very big component of our program is looking at the dairy case, hygiene conditions. We want to make sure that our farmers milk is represented in a clean presentation in the stores, because a consumer is not going to want to bring home a milk that's in a dirty case. You know, there are stores out there that the shelves are covered in mildew or accumulation of dried milk from, you know, products that leaks from time to time. So we really want to make sure that our stores are prioritizing cleaning those shelves so that our product is always represented in a clean fashion. The stores that are on our program, 80% of those are clean status. You know, there's always going to be a few that we have to continually push but we work really closely with our dairy category buyers at the headquarters level for retailers to get those conditions taken care of and resolved. We have gone so far as to make our suggestions of rotational cleaning for stores to follow. So if they don't have the labor hours to be able to devote to deep cleanings regularly, we suggest that they do a rotational clean so they take one bossy cart or one door of milk at a time, deep clean that, and then move on to the next one the following week. And that is really something that's a little bit easier for a store to adopt, because, you know, labor hours in stores are at a premium, whether it's to pack out product or to clean the shops. Ourselves. Everyone is stretched really thin right now, so rotational cleaning definitely helps them to overcome a larger issue.

 

Theresa Reps 10:08

How important do you feel are the relationships that you have with the retailers?

 

Kim Villani 10:13

Without those relationships, we would not be able to accomplish what we accomplish in stores, the work that my team does, that the rest of our retail departments do, is really about building trust with our retailers. That is first and foremost, because we wouldn't have the success that we have if we were not able to establish trust with those retailers that allows us, you know, a foot in the door, a seat at the table, to have a conversation, to sell in our programs with them. They believe in what we're doing and saying we provide data points to show proven you know, results from our programs and how it will benefit them. But really, relationships are so important to be able to have, whether at the store level or at the headquarters level with a retailer.

 

Theresa Reps 11:01

So Kim, you guys cover a large area. We listed multiple states at the beginning that you cover tell us a little bit more about the amount of consumers that are in that area, in the cities that you you are work with these retailers in.

 

Kim Villani 11:16

So yes, our region is is quite expansive in the, you know, lay of the land, so to speak, we have major metropolitan areas. New York City is a big one that we we have always covered with our retail programs. We have Philadelphia, we have Baltimore, we have Dc, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo. But we also have rural areas within New York and Pennsylvania, that we visit stores there as well. So we want to make sure that we have our programs meeting the needs of all of our customers throughout our entire marketing area.

 

Theresa Reps 11:52

That's amazing. So in addition to the dairy aisle performance program, you guys also have another program called the dairy Isle reinvention So Nick, can you share a little bit more about what that program is and how it functions?

 

Nick DePalma 12:07

Yeah, I'll give you a little history of how it started. I believe, if my numbers are right, it's about 19 years ago, 20 years ago, DMI came to us. They were partnering with Kraft trying to launch the dairy owl reinvention program and asked if we can get it in the stores. We were able to get it into ShopRite with basically a one day meeting. We tested five stores. The goal from DMI and Kraft and us was to create the best shopping experience in the dairy department to sell more product. If you know anything about the dairy, Dairy Aisle, every supermarket fixed up every part of their store, and dairy never changed. It was still the same from 1970s and basically that's how I sold it in to an owner. He said, Yeah, we haven't done anything in dairy because dairy sells itself. Well, dairy doesn't just sell itself. There's a lot of great things in dairy that can be promoted. So we were able to launch a five test store. After the test stores were done, everybody wanted it. You know, we were working with ShopRite at the time, and they wanted to expand it. We worked with, we worked with different a company we work with now, Concord companies, who works with all our decals and all the stuff we do to put in the store. We worked it down to, we can do a store from anywhere. It's between $1,000.03 $1,000 just by developing easier concepts and cost effective concepts, because we couldn't survive on doing five stores a year. On average, we do anywhere between 80 to 100 stores a year. So and one of the things we do is we will have stores that will remodel. If we know a remodel is going on and they're changing colors, we'll take the old material out and we'll move it to another store that we're introducing it to. So we always try to recycle our material too, because we don't, you know we are we do have a budget. We want to do the best we can. One of the Our goal with dairy Island reinvention was to be fully developed. So we have the dairy out performance program, which, without the dairy out performance program, it'd be hard to do the dairy hour reinvention, because my four people, my directors, can't be in all the stores Kim's people are in. So we all work together. First thing we look at is sales for space. And our goal is to increase dairy space, more space, more sales, dairy variety. We test new concepts. We always test new concepts and stores moving forward. One of the things we tested with when we started dairy hourly inventions was grab and go. We tested grab and go with milk. We developed with ShopRite, working with I worked with them on a protein snacking section featuring string cheese, because everybody knows proteins the trend that. Expanded to every single retailer, and now it's with they call it healthy snacking. We developed a yogurt divider 12 years ago, working with a company and tested it in ShopRite. We have over 3000 stores with yogurt dividers, including Aruba, and over $8 million they invested. So it's kind of something proud that we started a trend. We started chunk cheese pushers for the chunk cheese. Shred Cheese Company came to us to help them expand a program. And we don't just say, Okay, we'll try it. We have to know it works. We tested a couple that has rolled out, oh my God, through every one of our retailers, it's doing phenomenal on all our signage. We try to do healthy messaging. And one of the most important things we did, and it was kind of something that a lot of stores are remodeling, and they were doing cows on the wall, the cartoon cows, drawing the cows. I went to my CEO at the time, I go, don't we work for dairy farmers? He goes, yes. I go, What about if we take pictures of our dairy farms and maybe they'll put that on the wall. So we did, we did three farms in New Jersey, and we we sent it to ShopRite, and we had a store that remodeled, and the whole entire Dairy Aisle above the dairy case was the local dairy farmers. It was amazing. So that's something that we incorporated in our signage. We really try to push to know who your dairy farmer is and showing that they're local.

 

Theresa Reps 16:39

So Nick, for those of us that aren't, you know, live and breathe in the retail space. You know, you said yogurt divider. What? What is that? What is a yogurt divider?

 

Nick DePalma 16:49

A yogurt divider is a it's a plastic it looks like a little you that the yogurt goes on and it keeps it separated. If you ever see a yogurt section that doesn't have a yogurt divider. It's a disaster. And it also has a pull tab, so when it's merchandise back and it's sold, you pull the pull tab and it pulls the yogurt and fronts it. And everything we've done whenever we test something like this, we we have worked with a bishop, we've worked with the chain itself, and we get numbers. We get data. We haven't really had any failures. But for example, if, if it was a failure and it didn't increase sales, we wouldn't invest our time or money. Yogurt dividers had anywheres between a three to 14% sales lift, not counting what it did for the retailers where it cut labor by 40% cut time packing out. Cut it also increase space. Because if anybody knows the yogurt section, when you're out of stock on something, you just spread out something else. We had stores that had to increase space because they realized they were losing variety.

 

Theresa Reps 18:00

So to clarify something, because you've talked a little bit about the dairy aisle reinvention and the cost when you first started, you said was upwards of $100,000 to get in and now you've narrowed it down to 1000 to $3,500 what was that time span that it took to get to that point?

 

Nick DePalma 18:23

Well, the first, the first development, we cut it down to 50, and that was took about a year or two. But then at, you know, it's like anything as you're putting stuff in you, you think of, there's better ways. Just to give you an example. We hang headers, and headers might say on a kids yogurt, Greek yogurt, shred cheese with the picture. We were putting a valence on the dairy case, which costs $6,000 to hang. $150 header, I said we could do better, so we developed a magnetic L bracket like we actually developed it. A magnetic L bracket had a company make it so we didn't have to put a wood header on to put, you know what balance to hold our header. We develop stuff like that, better ways to Hang a Door blade or an open case blade, because one of the things with dairy armor invention in an open case, we use headers to to call out sections, and we use blades because nobody walks looking high. So we have the blades hanging right in the aisle, like, right, you know, between, like, say, shred cheese, chunk cheese, calling out with a picture so a customer's walking the case and can see where each product is. That blade is a $15 blade. We used to put the valence on and everything to hold a $15 blade. So we also developed one magnetic system, which was $20 to hold. The blade. Now we have something that's $3 to hold the blade, and it's magnetic. So everything we do is movable, too, whether it's magnetics. Our decals, we use magnetic decals for Safeway. All our decals on our doors are, you know, description shows a picture of the product and on the headers themselves. We always try to do a healthy messaging for dairy. You know, yogurt high in protein, refuel with chocolate milk. Our milk header is from our farm to your table, featuring our local dairy farm. The same with the decal. So it's really calling out the sections, and when you walk down a store now that a lot of our stores in New Jersey and everywhere are over 300 linear feet of dairy, you might have 200 dairy doors. When you walk down an aisle that has dairy doors with no signage on it, you'll spend more time walking back and forth, our signage, our blades, our geek house, have helped the shopper find product, and it also worked really well with shoppers who don't understand English, because they can relate to the picture, and that really helped. And we've done some tests with that in two, two supermarkets that had a 9% lift in sales after we did English, Spanish, English, Spanish on all our decals.

 

Theresa Reps 21:30

That's impressive. So both you, Kim and Nick, talked about the importance of data and using data to help shape how you're working with the retailers. So how do you stay on top of some of those trends in the marketplace? And Kim, I'll ask you that first.

 

Kim Villani 21:50

So we get national sales data as well as regional sales data from a couple of different sources, serkana, Willard, bishop, and then we use and milk PEP, we also utilize that in conjunction with the data that we're collecting at the actual store level. So by combining those two data points together, we we see what trends are happening, and we talk to our dairy category managers about what we're seeing in their stores and what we're seeing either on a national level or a regional level of what the consumers are doing. And you know in 2024 we know that in our region alone, whole milk was up 4% lactose free was up 11% so when we have our quarterly meetings to discuss our findings from our store visits, we always bring that data with us to discuss with our retailers, and we see the action taking place. We know that plant based is down. It was down. I believe it was 5.6% in 2024 so we now, at the beginning of this year, one of our major retailers in our market, they were actually switching out. They were expanding milk and reducing plant based products. That particular retailer, you know, of that space that was gained, 63% of that space went directly to fluid milk, 23% went to flavored milk. And on average, for that retailer, 12 feet of space was being gained for milk, and 12 feet of space was being taken away from plant based

 

Theresa Reps 23:29

Nick. So what about the work that you do? How do you stay on top of trends?

 

Nick DePalma 23:33

Out of trends, we've started, and we were always pushed to start. No matter what we were doing at American Dairy Association, we could just start dairy on reinvention, get yogurt dividers and the first question, what's next? So we always looked ahead of what's next after dairy armor invention after yogurt dividers. We worked with a company, actually, and tested, helped them develop chunk cheese pushers. So you know, the chunk cheese section, you pull it up, it automatically rotates it up. And that was a section that was mess. We tested that. And our shop, right, is our go to company that they always work with us. And, you know, we talk about ACV, they do over $15 billion in sales, over $4 billion in dairy sales, and they work with us on anything we test, so it's great. The chunk cheese had a three to 7% increase we tested, grab and goes. I spoke about that, that when we tested, we pulled the numbers was a 15.6% increase just in milk, shred cheese pushers, we had actually a company come to us and say, Hey, can you help us? We tested it to see if it was any good. In the one story we tested in the same space, you were able to get 482 more units packed out. It's 482 units. Think it came to per four feet, five facings per four feet. Machine of new product, such new opportunity of cheese, especially with the growth of cheese, and the increase in sales was four to 7% once we saw that, we said, Okay, we'll test this with you. So we tested a couple stores. It has expanded where we're not paying for anything anymore, ShopRite, Weiss tops, Acme, Safeway. So it's expanded throughout the marketplace. So a lot of trends that we worked with were stuff that we looked at and what we can do. I would go to Kim and say, any reps see anything that like, what section needs help that's dairy related? What section can we do something in the healthy snacking was when all the sorrento products came out and all the convenience dairy we worked with ShopRite. I was in meetings and we they came up with a protein snacking section, which now everybody expanded to a healthy snack snacking section that had 33% sales growth in four years because it was product that was just spread around the store, and everybody loves protein now, so

 

Theresa Reps 26:09

awesome. Well, thank you both so much for sharing a little bit more about your retail programs and the awesome work that you're doing on behalf of farmers. Quickly, let what's one thing that you hope that farmers get from the conversation that we have today. Nick, I'll toss it your way the

 

Nick DePalma 26:26

one, one of the thing is about the retail team and the team that Kim works with, um, the amount of dedication I have to their job and how hard they'll work for dairy farmer. And I'll give you an example. And this is one of the proudest moments, and it was a funny thing too, because Kim and I didn't think nothing of it, until someone questioned us, and then we questioned one of our our retail our retail reps during COVID, nobody was going in stores. Everybody stayed home. Our reps were still staying in the course and doing eight to 10 stores a day. They couldn't do audits like they do now. DAP reports they were in coolers helping pack out milk, and they didn't want to stay at one store, so they were hitting eight to spend 10 stores a day. We were so proud of that, but we never stopped to ask them if it's okay or they feel safe. We questioned every one of them, and they said, nobody in the store is there working. We got to get milk on the shelf. Our directors were doing installs of our dairy reinvention packages on off hours, four o'clock in the morning, five o'clock in the morning, after seven o'clock at night, when the stores were closed. So we never shut down what we were doing. And that's just a tribute to the great people we have working on our team and how they work together.

 

Theresa Reps 27:43

I love that. Kim, what about you? What would you like farmers to get from this conversation?

 

Kim Villani 27:51

Well, you know, nearly 75% of milk is being sold in retail stores, and I would want them to know that the staff that we have is so very dedicated to not only increasing sales, but knowing that the product that we represent is a healthy, safe product, and there's no better feeling than to go into a retailer for the first time and tell them that we work for dairy farmers, that they're So very receptive, and I would love for dairy farmers to know that they are well respected amongst retailers, and that, you know, consumers love their product, and we're very happy to represent them.

 

Theresa Reps 28:34

Great well. Thank you, Nick and Kim, so much for your time today and sharing a little bit more about the amazing work that you're doing with retailers. We appreciate everyone listening in and we will see you next time.

 

Your Dairy Checkoff Podcast 28:49

Thanks for listening to your Dairy Checkoff podcast. Want to hear more about how your checkoff is making every drop count, head over to dairycheckoff.com or follow us wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time you.