Eat'n Park Switches to Milk With No Added Hormones

Eat'n Park Restaurants will serve and use only milk with no artificially engineered growth hormones (rBGH-free). The switch, which has been implemented in all restaurant locations in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, comes as the company continues to set industry standards and show its commitment to finding and sourcing the freshest and healthiest ingredients.

According to Brooks Broadhurst, senior vice president of Food and Beverage, Eat'n Park Restaurants, the chain takes great care in offering guests the healthiest ingredients. Eat'n Park's focus on offering healthy ingredients gained steam when the company was the first restaurant chain in the country to switch to trans-fat free cooking oils in October 2005.

"First it was the switch to trans-fat free cooking oils, then we introduced our FarmSource(TM) program which features fresh, seasonal produce and other items purchased from local farmers," said Broadhurst. "Now, we are proud to serve only milk with no added hormones."

According to Broadhurst, Eat'n Park has partnered with its two milk suppliers, Turner Diary, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg Dairy, Harrisburg, Pa., to make the switch to serving only rBGH-free milk.

"Eat'n Park is in touch with their guests," said Chuck Turner, Jr., Turner Dairy. "The company recognized guests were seeking more natural products. Eat'n Park visited our dairies and sat with our farmers across their kitchen tables to discuss the issue. Through collaboration, we've been able to successfully certify that our milk is rBGH-free."

In response to this growing demand among guests for more natural and fresh ingredients, Eat'n Park has also recently made the switch to offering Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon from farm-raised salmon. Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon freely swim in the cold, clean waters of the North Pacific giving the fish a more natural flavor, color, and texture than farm-raised fish.

Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), also known as BGH or BST, was introduced to the milk market in 1993. It is a genetically engineered copy of a naturally occurring hormone produced by cows that boosts the amounts of milk a cow can produce. There is currently no test that can distinguish between milk from rBGH-treated and untreated cows. Approximately 10 percent of the United States' fluid milk supply is labeled rBGH-free.

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