I rewrapped the parcel and left it on her desk. When she opened it and found the huge bottle of white milk with pink letter "Breast Milk", her reaction was the same as mine "urgh".
We filmed people's responses as Kiri showed them the bottle. A chorus of "urghs".
It seems a bottle labelled breast milk was too much to stomach.
Then our rural reporter stepped in with some gumboot practicality,
"It is not real breast milk, dummies. It is cow's breast milk."
Of course, I thought, it's some organic speciality milk. Gourmet. Breast milk from a cow.
But hang on, I know my farming knowledge is minimal, but isn't all cow's milk breast milk? It comes from that udder thing. Is that a breast? Urgh.
After reading the bottle about three times, we got it. It wasn't real breast milk at all (of course) but a repackaging of the company's most popular milk for the charity, Breast Cancer Cure. Twenty cents from each bottle would be donated to the charity.
When we realised our mistake, we found it hilarious. You have to hand it to Lewis Road Creamery, they know how to capture consumer attention.
Their chocolate milk quickly developed cult status, due to a pre-launch campaign on social media which generated such hype that demand for the product was 30 times what the company had predicted.
Perhaps it's not surprising to note that Lewis Road founder is Peter Cullinane, a former global chief operating officer for advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi. Not everyone has found the ambiguity of the breast milk labelling as funny as we did.
NZME. reported this week that breast feeding advocates have slammed it as "unacceptable".
New Zealand Breastfeeding Authority chief executive Julie Stufkens said the move was disrespectful towards women.
Stufkens said she was concerned mothers could mistake the product as human breast milk.
A Lewis Road company spokeswoman said she was confident there would be no confusion as, aside from the large pink lettering, the bottle does state that it is cow's milk, and that it would be in the chiller alongside regular milks.
La Leche League New Zealand spokeswoman Lisa Manning agreed, saying she didn't think people were that "silly".
Silly us. Of course human breast milk is not going to be on sale in a supermarket. Plus, given the size of the bottle, if you had to express all that milk, then there really is only one thing you can be - a cow.
Predictably, this debate fired up on social media.
Some lamented the fact that anyone could be offended by the product, that it was for a charity and breast milk advocates should just get over themselves.
Others were incredulous that anyone could be mistaken, with one Facebook poster commenting: "Seriously, if you are that thick you think it's breast milk, how have you not drowned in your cereal?"
By now I was starting to feel a bit of a tit for thinking it was human breast milk at first.
It shows how much we are influenced by labelling, and how little we take notice of small print, as our food labelling story shows today.
It also got me thinking: why are we so repulsed with our "urghs" at the thought of human breast milk in a bottle? As many pointed out on Facebook, we are happy to drink the milk of another species but not our own.
Despite all the efforts of the health services to promote breast feeding - the goal of the New Zealand Breastfeeding Authority is for it to become a cultural norm - it is not.
In the Bay of Plenty DHB region, 79 per cent of infants were exclusively or fully breastfed at two weeks, this dropped to 75 per cent at six weeks and 58 per cent by three months, according to 2014 figures from the Ministry of Health.
Many mothers I know admit they hated breastfeeding.
One took formula to a coffee group and pretended it was breast milk, as she did not want to feel shamed by others.
Others talk of midwives grabbing their breasts minutes after they have given birth and plugging the newborn on, as though they were fitting a tap washer.
Breastfeeding could perhaps gain more acceptance if health professionals and ministry guidelines adopted an approach more like - breastfeeding is great if you want to do it and it works for you and your family, and we will help you if you want to do it, but formula is also okay if that is what you decide.
This would be much more palatable for women than the zealous breastfeeding mafia-like approach of some.
Which perhaps explains the backlash on social media - that people think the reaction of some breastfeeding advocates is a bit over the top.
Labelling the milk as breast milk is a marketing gimmick that worked, as we are all talking about it.
Plus it is for a great cause - breast cancer.
Believing it was real breast milk like I did at first may have been a bit blonde. But getting offended over it is udderly ridiculous.
