Pizza Hut says it will add 25 percent more cheese to its personal pizzas as part of a deal with the administrators of the dairy checkoff. The deal comes as dairy farmers are facing national overproduction of milk and falling prices.
The deal was negotiated by Dairy Management Inc., which administers the national dairy checkoff. Dairy farmers pay 15 cents per hundred pounds of milk sold into the national dairy checkoff fund. The fund totaled over $112 million in 2015. The money is supposed to pay for generic national promotion and marketing programs. DMI has partnerships with several fast food chains, including McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Domino’s.
DMI has come under fire by some independent dairy farmers who say it allocates too much of its funds to extravagant salaries for top executives. In 2014 and 2015, Thomas Suber, DMI’s CEO at the time, was paid over $2.1 million in total compensation. Suber also worked as CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, a project of DMI. He retired in 2016 and was replaced by Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack.