USA – Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), an American milk cooperative has revealed participating companies for the 2019 DFA Accelerator program.

The program supports startups in both ag tech and dairy food products to grow their businesses while executing innovation through partnerships.

The startups engaged in in a 90-day immersive program and worked directly with leaders from DFA, CoBank, Sprint and other industry experts and mentors to create strategic, long-term partnerships.

The selected ag tech and dairy food product companies also received mentorship, connections and resources to help accelerate their growth.

The 90-day program included discussions around business development, pilots and potential sponsorships, product, brand, marketing and entrepreneurship as well as access to state-of-the-art workspace facilities.

“In selecting participating companies for the DFA Accelerator program we looked at not only the potential of their innovations, but also at the opportunity to form long-term partnerships,” said Monica Massey, executive vice president and chief of staff at DFA.

“Though demo day is the conclusion of the official 2019 program, we view it as the start-line for what we hope are potential, long-term partnerships that will yield positive benefits to DFA and its family-farm owners using innovation and technology.”

The 2019 DFA Accelerator class in the ag tech category included Bezoar Laboratories, Healthy Cow and Boston’s artificial intelligence-powered smartphone platform, Labby.

The Dairy food products startups include Brooklyn Buttery, Numa and RifRaf.

DFA’s last year accelerator programme’s finalists included Pharm Robotics, Ripe Technologies, SomaDetect, Cheddies, MoPro Nutrition and Too Cool Chix.

In July, DFA said it had invested Mopro Nutrition, the manufacturer of a whole milk Greek yoghurt infused with CFM whey protein isolate.

The company last year acquired Agropur-owned production facility in St. Paul, Minnesota to strengthen presence in the United States.

The deal was meant to strengthen its extended shelf-life capabilities and introduce aseptic processing into its business portfolio.