The strange happenings of the dairy industry continued last month, as one Washington state company decided to jump out of the milk business, and a neighboring company that has redefined coffee began telling the world that it is actually IN the milk business.

The first bit of news came from Roy-based Wilcox Family Farms. This 99-year-old farm operation became an integrated dairy processor in 1973, and it built a new processing plant just a little over a decade ago.  Recently it has offered both organic and no-rBST milk, and runs a dairy home delivery. Like most local processors it has a well-developed local brand.

However, Wilcox is also in the egg business, and of late it has moved into the free- range/organic/all natural/omega 3-fortified side of the egg business. Wilcox likes what it sees there—so much so that it’s ditching the cows in favor of longhorn hens. A few miles up the road in Seattle, Starbucks Corp., has become the world’s coffee king. It was just hitting stride in 1997, when Wilcox built the new dairy. Today Starbucks is like other big companies—pedaling and pedaling to keep the sales charts heading in the right direction.

So one of its latest maneuvers toward that end is to team up with the dairy industry in an ad campaign that will tell consumers about something dairy processors and Starbucks have already come to know. The fact is, Starbucks sells a lot of milk with its coffee. With lattes and Frappuccinos making up such a big part of Starbucks’ business, it might be argued that the world’s biggest coffee company actually sells a lot of coffee with its milk.

So, last month Starbucks began promoting milk consumption with a print ad created by Lowe, of New York. The ad features coffeehouse barista Young Han wearing a foam milk mustache, and it was set to run late last month in Entertainment Weekly and in the New York Times Magazine.

“Now, given how health conscious people are, Starbucks saw this was a great way to get milk in the diet, and the processor saw value in getting that message out there,” said Sal Taibi, president of Lowe, which created the ad. The agency worked with Kemps and MilkPEP to put the campaign together.

But while Starbucks sees milk as an opportunity, Wilcox said in announcing its exit, that “the high costs of doing business in the dairy industry” drove it away. The company told local media that its milk business has not been profitable for years.

Wilcox and Starbucks are very different businesses of course, so no surprise really that they would have such different perspectives on milk.

February is the issue in which we offer our Annual Ice Cream Outlook, so I’ll share with you now a bit of ice cream related “humor” that comes from the youngest member of the Phillips family, who turns four this month.

“Why did the dinosaur cross the road,” he asked me recently. “To get to the ice cream.”