by                                                                         H. Claire Brown

How big businesses buy — and sell — food produced by inmates

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2021-05-19 08:08:20

by H. Claire Brown

It’s generally illegal to sell prison-made goods across state lines. But since the 1930s, the law has included an exemption for agriculture.

In 2011, Leprino Foods, the $3 billion company that supplies all the mozzarella to Papa John’s, Pizza Hut, and Domino’s pizza chains, lost its buffalo milk supplier in India.

Pictured above: Archival photographs from Angola Prison farm in Louisiana, inmates at the fish processing center at the East Canon City Prison Complex in Colorado.

Water buffalo milk isn’t easy to find in the United States, especially not as much as a company as big as Denver-based Leprino could use. The animals are finicky, sometimes refusing to give milk at the sight of a stranger, and they produce only a fraction of the milk that cows make. 

But Leprino was in luck: One of its existing suppliers, which soon became one of the largest buffalo dairies in the United States, agreed to step in, and the milk began to flow. Leprino trademarked the slogan “with a kiss of buffalo milk” for Bacio, its premium mozzarella line marketed to independent pizzerias. Yet something seemed amiss, according to pizza cheese enthusiasts who frequented online forums: Where was Bacio getting the buffalo milk, and how much was it actually using? 

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