The new milk tribes: how the white stuff became a billion dollar business
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Coffee was first to be taken seriously. Now that we’ve got that right, attention has turned to milk. It’s not just black or white; there are shades of grey, or rather different shades of white, from goat’s milk to oat’s milk. And now there’s pea milk — a company planning to make pure protein milk from yellow peas has just won $110 million from investors including Goldman Sachs.
Even cow’s milk has its own identity politics. Full fat is back among healthy eaters who drink it for the good fats, calcium and iodine — but do you pasturise, and how important is it to buy it in eco-friendly glass bottles?
Milk and its variants are big money. The plant-based beverage industry is a £6.9 billion market and projected to grow to more than £11 billion this year. Oat milk is leading the boom. It gets points for foamability in cappucinos and having a smaller environmental footprint than almond milk. So what does your milk say about your ilk?
Raw milk
In other words, unpasteurised milk. It hasn’t been heated so it could still contain harmful bacteria — living on the edge — but also still contains all the goodness that large-scale dairy farms kill off and could help prevent respiratory infections and fever.
It usually comes from small, family farms so you are saving the dairy industry, one bowl of cereal at a time. Happily, the revolution tastes creamy and rich. You make the pilgrimage to the local farmer’s market to pick it up. Dreamers Farm at Stroud Green Market is your favourite — the milk comes from Guernsey and Jersey and they also sell yoghurt and cream. Unfortunately, it’s only open on Saturdays from 10am until 2pm and because the milk is raw you need to drink it before its sell-by date, so occasionally you find yourself doing a last-minute supermarket dash when you’ve run out midweek. But your intentions were laudable.
The Estate Dairy’s milk is equally rich and complex tasting — it’s used at Notes coffee shops and made to hold its own in foam.
The 8 best milk frothers for perfect at-home coffee
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The milk round
It’s not what milk you drink but the receptacle that matters to you. That’s why you have signed up for a milk round. You like the design classic bottle, it’s recyclable and you are getting fond of your milkman. He says he’ll stock almond milk soon.
Mylk
You suspect that you’re lactose-intolerant. Well, you haven’t been diagnosed but your yoga teacher suggested you try nut mylk and you’ve lost a stone. You flirt with different options — hazelnut is just like Nutella, you liked cashew but then you heard it was quite high-calorie.
Almond milk is nice in coffee, even though the Duchess of Cambridge said last month that she doesn’t like it. She’s missing out. You toyed with the idea of making your own but it came out as rather too expensive and messy. You’ve dabbled with the milk of alt farmyard animals but goat and sheep’s milk were rather too, well, goaty and sheepy.
Chocolate milk
Champion distance runner Mo Farah says it is a vital part of his post-running recovery programme so cease your scoffing. No ordinary chocolate milk will do so don’t you dare proffer Nesquik. This has to be single origin stuff. The Estate Dairy has a new unhomogoneised version and chef Tess Ward (who was linked to Harry Styles) has a recipe for a chocolate, almond coffee milk. Now that is fuel.