Thank you.
I think you're right. There's a raft of reasons, and I would say it's all of those. There's price, quality, availability--those are basically the three--and technology. The dairy industry in Canada wouldn't be where it is today (a) without supply management and (b) without the use of technology.
I explained the evolution that allowed us to use whey protein concentrate in cheese-making, for example. That same technology is applied throughout the industry for all product categories, so it's not surprising to me and to industry people that every effort is made to produce the highest-quality product at the lowest possible price.
The irony of this is that the industry gets no credit for it. The fact is that by DFC's own publications, dairy product prices to consumers in Canada are a better bargain than dairy product prices to consumers in the U.S.A.
Now, bear in mind that up to 90% of a finished product's total cost is the price of raw milk. So the difference between that 85% to 90% and 100% is divided among the rest of that food distribution chain--the dairy processor, the wholesaler, the retail distributor, and so on. Considering that the raw milk price in Canada is about the third-highest in the world--depending on the year, anywhere between 25% and 40% higher than in the U.S., and it's currently higher than the price in Europe generally--the consumer's obviously getting a bargain. That effort, which has to be made somewhere in the chain, is being made in the processing sector.
I'm not crying poor-mouth here; I'm just saying that we're applying the best manufacturing technology possible to deliver the most competitively priced product into the grocery basket, and that's what's happening.