Plant milk is on the cusp of another boom as the industry courts a huge demographic it has ignored so far: children.
Using colorful bottles of oat and pea milk packed with protein and prebiotics, the category is winning over parents. At Ripple Foods, a start-up that has raised more than US$200 million, its plant-based option for kids has more calcium and vitamin D than cows’ milk.
Sales of the offering have more than doubled expectations since launching last year, and distribution is increasing by more than 10,000 locations this year, including its debut in Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the US.
Illustration: Louise Ting
Milk alternatives have swept through the US in the past few years, approaching 20 percent of the market and US$4 billion in sales. Yet that growth came largely from adults adding them to coffee and smoothies. Now the industry is turning to children — easily the biggest consumers of milk in the US — in a looming threat to a dairy industry that has seen consumption decline for decades.
“When it came to the heaviest consumers in the category, no one was designing a product for them,” said Ripple Foods CEO Laura Flanagan, 53, who approved the creation of a kids offering shortly after joining the California-based company in 2019. “It was hugely exciting to uncover this unmet need.”
The opportunity is significant given that kids traditionally consume about twice as much milk as adults, but the US dairy industry is also entrenched. A glass of milk has symbolized childhood for generations. Iconic campaigns such as “Got Milk” and the “milk mustache” hardened the idea that being a good parent meant giving it to your offspring to help them grow strong from all its calcium and protein.
However, the success of products like Ripple’s are showing how much today’s kids and their millennial parents have changed. Thanks to the popularity of brands such as Oatly, about 60 percent of US households are buying alternative forms of milk, data from researcher Mintel Group showed.
Dairy allergies have also been rising in young children. Sales of milk substitutes rose 15 percent last year and are on track to nearly double to US$6.3 billion by 2026.
TAPPING A MARKET
While plant milk has not traditionally marketed its protein or calcium as benefits, they do when marketed as products for children. The bottle for Ripple Kids also touts Omega-3 for brain development and prebiotics that support “happy tummies.”
Ripple raised another US$60 million in September last year, pushing its valuation to about US$350 million, PitchBook said.
The company, cofounded by one of the entrepreneurs who started the Method brand of eco-friendly cleaning products, is on a brand awareness campaign that includes prime-time TV ads and boosting production to expand retail locations by 11-fold this year.
Getting kids interested in plant milk is “a huge untapped market,” said Alex Ruimy, cofounder of venture capital firm Rage Capital, which has a stake in Ripple.
“We’re not just talking about moms at home. We’re talking about schools, everything,” he said.
Overall, milk alternatives have received more than US$1 billion in funding since 2015, PitchBook said. That includes Perfect Day, which makes lab-created milk, taking in more than US$700 million from investors.
It is hard to imagine such a flurry of investment around the stuff from cows. Since 1975, consumption of fluid milk has declined more than 40 percent. People in the US are eating less cereal. There has been more competition from a booming sector of sodas, seltzers and flavored water. People gradually stopped drinking a glass of milk with meals.
Milk alternatives did not appear to be much of a threat early on. Soy milk had been available for decades, but never gained much ground. Then in the 2010s, nut milks started winning over younger consumers on claims that they were lower in calories and did not contain cholesterol. Within a decade, brands such as Oatly captured a stunning amount of the market. That came even as cows’ milk remained cheaper.
“Consumers are turning toward dairy alternatives in droves,” Mintel said in a report. “Dairy milk is missing the mark.”
MILK FIGHTS BACK
California dairy farmer Steve Maddox said the gallon jug of milk has become “boring,” but still believes that Americans could eventually come back to milk because plant-based offerings cannot measure up in the end.
“We’re all eternal optimists,” he said of the nation’s dairy farmers, who have struggled with rising costs and weakening demand for years.
The giant milk industry has been trying to hold onto children. To combat kids aging out earlier than previous generations, the trade has been using marketing campaigns to tell older children that they should continue to like milk.
Another effort called “Mess With Your Milk” tried to pitch milk as fun — beyond drinking it. This included adding food coloring and turning milk cartons into birdfeeders. For teens, Olympic athletes were paid to tout chocolate milk on TikTok, but there is not a lot of evidence that these efforts have worked.
“The only way out of declining commodity categories is innovation,” said Blake Waltrip, who heads US operations for the a2 Milk Company based in Sydney, adding that the dairy industry has relied too much on legacy products such as gallon jugs.
For its part, the company uses messages such as “Love Milk Again” as part of a push to sell milk with only a2 protein, which its research shows is easier on the stomach than the a1 protein in traditional milk.
Milk is also much cheaper than the kids-focused products trying to take its place. Ripple’s offering costs about US$0.11 per 30ml, more than three times the price of whole cows’ milk.
Then there are schools, which dairy dominates. US government standards allow public schools to serve fat-free or low-fat milk, and that “program operators must not promote or offer water, juice, or any other beverage as an alternative selection to fluid milk in a reimbursable meal.”
Even New York City’s new vegan Fridays in public schools have one exception: Cows’ milk is served to a system with 1 million students because the government requires it.
However, Ripple has made some inroads, selling to Chicago public schools, the third-largest district in the US.
Lifelong vegetarian Megan Meisner has been drinking almond milk for years, and this year the 40-year-old needed something to give her 18-month-old son who was shifting off breast milk. Enter Ripple Kids, which Meisner had noticed at her local Target store in Dallas, Texas. She saw the pea-based product as a better source of protein than almond milk, and now her son drinks glasses of it.
“I don’t want 50 percent of his diet coming from dairy,” she said, adding that he already eats yogurt and ricotta cheese. “When there’s an alternative to another dairy option, why not give him something else?”
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
Within Taiwan’s education system exists a long-standing and deep-rooted culture of falsification. In the past month, a large number of “ghost signatures” — signatures using the names of deceased people — appeared on recall petitions submitted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) against Democratic Progressive Party legislators Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) and Wu Pei-yi (吳沛憶). An investigation revealed a high degree of overlap between the deceased signatories and the KMT’s membership roster. It also showed that documents had been forged. However, that culture of cheating and fabrication did not just appear out of thin air — it is linked to the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
RSS