Cabot Creamery is holding a contest for recipes from food industry pros. Recipes must use Cabot’s Light natural cheddar cheeses, and the grand prize is a sapphire & diamond ring plus a Vermont vacation for two at Stoweflake Spa & Resort. Other prizes include $200 and a $50 cheese gift pack for each category.

Dannon has partnered with America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s food bank network, to help feed hungry children and their families throughout the United States. The partnership features a Dannon Drive to End Hunger truck traveling on a cross-country tour that is making stops at more than 100 grocery stores from Southern California to New England to raise charitable donations that will provide approximately 400,000 meals for hungry children and their families. When shoppers at each tour stop purchase a Dannon product, a donation is made from Dannon to food banks in the local area.

Andy Rooney recently made some observations about milk during one of his curmudgeonly talks on television—more specifically why people drink less milk. The biggest target of his criticism was fat-free half and half “Not half of anything I want,” he commented after reading the ingredient panel. Predictably his closing suggestion was to “go back to selling what comes out of a cow.”

Groupe Lactalis will take over a third facility in Poland next year and plans to make Poland the center of its Baltic dairy operations. The French company’s most recent purchase is a cheese facility in Winnica, which, like its other Polish holdings, was formerly owned by Dutch Campina. Lactalis is the world’s largest seller of camembert style cheese and a major packager and exporter of shelf stable milk products.

China’s American Dairy Inc., says sales and earnings continue to skyrocket in the third-quarter, with revenue up 65% to $14.3 million, and profits jumping 75% to $6.7 million.

Local and foreign investors had an opportunity last month to buy into Vietnam’s biggest dairy firm Vinamilk as it sold more shares in an effort to list on the country’s stock market in 2006. Finnish Valio has begun to export lactose-free semi-skimmed milk drink produced in Finland to Belgium through its subsidiary Valio-Vache Bleue.