In August 2012, United Dairy, an independent family-owned dairy with plants in Martins Ferry, Ohio, Charleston, West Virginia, and Uniontown, Pennsylvania, quietly began a trial run of a new gallon jug produced in its Martins Ferry facility and rolled it out without fanfare to eight of its retail customers. Some in-store consumer polling was conducted and was uniformly positive, which encouraged United Dairy to move forward in January 2013 to full implementation at all three of its plants. Since then, United Dairy has produced 80 million of its new EGOJUG™ gallon beverage containers and saved 1.7 million pounds of HDPE plastic over the ensuing twenty-two month period.
Mid-America Machining, Inc., a Brooklyn, MI-based manufacturer of extrusion blow molds and tooling, invested heavily into the design and developed its patented jug and tooling over a two-year period through multiple design iterations. The primary goals of the development were to significantly reduce the amount of HDPE needed per unit, while integrating other design advantages and minimizing the operational changes that dairy plants would have to endure.