EXPERIMENT STATION BULLETINS. 



523 



among the many varieties which this city's taste requires. A recent 

 bulletin from the United States Department of Agriculture entitled ''The 

 Market Milk Business of Detroit, Michigan, in 1915," to which we are 

 indebted for the following data, makes the statement that consumers 

 upon a typical retail milk route in Detroit will demand daily 256 pints 

 of milk in quart bottles. 201 pints of milk in pint bottles, 19 pints of 

 certified or modified milk, 22 pints of cream aucl 15 pints of buttermilk. 

 Furthermore since there are nearly 300 customers upon a route, slightly 

 more than a pint of milk products j)er customer is therefore used. 



Fig. 1. Detroit uses 700 of these daily. 



The agencies and appliances for distributing this vast amount of milk 

 in so many forms during the few morning hours of each day over so 

 wide an area as Detroit embraces and to so many people, must necessarily 

 be extensive and elaborate. The agencies themselves are the well-known 

 distributing plants, while tlic cJiief api)liances are the still better known 

 milk wagons with their suggestive letterings, and the ponderous milk 

 trucks which carry the unprocessed milk from the railroad stations and 

 attend to the wholesale trade deliveries. 



The milk distributing plants indeed are more in the nature of mills 

 or factories than that of depots or storage houses both on account of their 

 heavy machine equipment and also on account of their large numbers of 

 men needed as laborers. Since two of these plants alone have the capac- 

 ity^ for furnishing nearly half of Detroit's milk supply, it may be well 

 to describe milk distribution at its maxinunn by using one of these as 

 the type and assuming a more or less close similarity on the part of the 

 others. Our plant then being chosen, the fitness of its site may be ac- 

 cepted as settled by the two expediency rules of closeness to customers 

 and to transportation and also by that of relative cheapness. 



\^1iether so settled or otherwise, the city area or as much of it as may 

 be purveyed to bj' tlie plant in question must now be plotted into routes 

 for milk delivery having in mind all the savings which come from reach- 

 ing the largest number of customers through the shortest possible hauls. 



