Dodgers Blue Heaven: Dodgers Cards on Milk Cartons

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Dodgers Cards on Milk Cartons

Where the heck have I been? What are these?

I recently came across several eBay listings (here and here) featuring single serving sized milk cartons featuring Dodger players on a side panel. Check out the pics above and below. Four Dodgers are known to me (Clayton Kershaw, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier), and I wonder if there are any more.

As you can see, they were created by Driftwood Dairy and the LA Dodgers Foundation appears to be a sponsor. Apparently, unopened cartons (without any milk inside) where distributed at a Dodger game on June 16, 2014 to the surprise of fans in attendance - although, it's not clear to me if everybody got one or only folks within a certain section.

Being the fanatic collector that I am, I had to dig a little further to find out more and came across something on the Dodger website (link here).

The Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation (LADF) strongly believes that children who are healthy can achieve far greater results in the classroom than those who are ill and lack basic nutrition.

School Fuel is a 3-year campaign supporting universal breakfast for 700,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. School Fuel was created by the LA Fund for Public Education.
...
LADF is the exclusive sports team partner of School Fuel. In addition to program support, the LADF features the Dodgers Foundation logo, player images and content on milk cartons and breakfast trays distributed to students each morning. Current Dodger players, Clayton Kershaw, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Andre Ethier and Carl Crawford have lent their brand to this program that promotes health and wellness, a key pillar of LADF.

It appears that only four Dodger players are currently available, and that (along with the game giveaway) full cartons with milk where also distributed at schools as a part of this meal program. Based on the numbers above these cartons do not appear to be rare; as it's likely that hundreds of thousands were printed up (if not millions). Of course, it's also unlikely that large numbers of these will survive the test of time, so who knows.

Of note, the unopened empty cartons given away at the Dodger game in 2014 might prove to be scarce as time goes on; especially if kept in original unopened carton form. For now, you can probably purchase them for only a few bucks a piece. Sooner or later I'll have to track these down to add to my collection.