Turner Dairy Farms is adding a little intergalactic flavor to its specialty milk line, changing the labels on its Birthday Cake Milk in recognition of the annual unofficial Star Wars holiday, May the Fourth Be With You Day.
Turner’s will sell Blue Banthamilk on a limited basis.
And yes, the containers literally have a sell-by date of May 4.
“Last year for the May the Fourth Be With You Day, just as a joke, I put blue food coloring in a half-gallon of our 2% milk and made a joke label in Photoshop that I posted,” said Turner’s Marketing Manager Steve Turner.
The post got quite a reaction.
“People kind of went nuts over it,” Turner said. “For this year, we were working on our limited-edition milk schedule. We were thinking it wasn’t that much of a stretch to make the milk blue, and we were already planning this blue birthday milk to celebrate our 90th anniversary.”
The Birthday Cake Milk, colored light blue, is the same shade as the milk from the fictional Bantha creature, a part of the Star Wars universe since the very first film in 1977. In “Star Wars: A New Hope,” Luke Skywalker’s Aunt Beru pours a glass of Bantha milk for Luke’s Uncle Owen.
Labeled as the “Official Milk of Tatooine,” the extra-sweet whole milk was originally made in honor of Turner’s 90th anniversary on April 10.
But as the new month rolls around, Star Wars fans will likely be clamoring to get hold of the limited-edition Blue Banthamilk containers featuring the large, hairy fantasy creature, which kind of looks like a woolly mammoth with ram’s horns instead of tusks and a trunk.
Turner is a longtime “Star Wars” fan.
“It’s something I grew up watching and it’s kind of been around for most of my life,” he said.
