SUPPLY OF PURE MILK

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1746, 23 August 1905, Page 58

SUPPLY OF PURE MILK

A curious ease (Richards v. Weston) relating to the supply of pure milk was recently heard in the King’s Bench Division. It -appears that the plaintiff purchased a milk business from the defendant in St. John’s Wood for £B9OO. Before the sale the defendant had been i i the habit of separating and selling the cream from 26 gallons of milk, and adding the resulting skim- milk to the pure milk which she sold to her customers. In the contract of sale she had represented to the plaintiff that the daily sale of milk was 320 gallons at 4d a quart. The defendants alleged that there had' been a breach of warranty, inasmuch as the £IBOO per annum profits on which the sale price had been calculated included the profits made by the daily sale of 64 quarts of cream, abstracted from the 26 gallons of milk. Mir Justice Wills came to the conclusion that there was no guarantee, express or implied, that the milk which the defendant sold to her customers was as it came from the cow. The warranty which she had given only extended to a series of weeks, not to a whole year. In his opinion the defendant’s books, which had been inspected by the plaintiff, clearly showed the practice, and that dispensed with further notice. The important words in the judgment are these: “I do not think that Section IX of the S'ale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875 hits this practice of selling skim milk mixed with normal milk, and no one has been prosecuted for such an act; nor do I think that Section XI of the Act of 1899 made it an offence.” In the event he gave judgment for the defendant. Section XI of the Abt of 1899, which was apparently designed to prevent the sale of skim milk without warning to the purchaser, provides that every tin or other receptacle containing skim milk must have a label to that effect.