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It’s a bold new future for Ontario milk drinkers: after a year of bureaucratic wrangling, 3-litre milk containers are now legal and cleared for sale on grocery shelves.

A tribunal hearing scheduled for next week was cancelled after the regulators who oversee Ontario’s Milk Act decided to throw caution to the wind and just open up the market to the new size.

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“We finally stepped back from it and, no different from you, said this is way too complicated,” said Geri Kamenz, the chair of the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission. “We’ll just put it out there and say, ‘Here it is, it’s an option, do with it what you want.’”

The rule change officially went through on Nov. 19. Now, when you thumb through a copy of the Milk Act’s Regulation 753, you’ll see a new entry in the Size of Containers category: “A container that is three litres.”

The quarrel started in the fall of 2013, when two dairy industry groups received a letter from the marketing commission. It notified them that Mac’s Convenience Stores wanted to try a “new fluid milk test market initiative,” which simply meant selling milk in 3-litre containers.