Want almond milk?
More and more consumers do. They’ve also got soy milk, coconut milk, flax milk and all sorts of trendy juices and bottled waters. But good old milk – the moo kind – keeps fading from grocery lists.
Milk’s rate of decline in 2011 and 2012 was the highest in more than a decade, though per capita consumption has been falling for years and dropped 25 per cent from 1975 through 2012, according to US data.
Milk drinking by both kids and adults has particularly declined during prime-time: meals. The tall, cool glass of milk with a sandwich at lunch or a burger at dinner is increasingly an anachronism.
«If I’m with another adult and they have milk during dinner, it seems kind of nostalgic,» said Amy Bryant, a mother of daughters, aged eight and five.
While producers have offset milk’s decline by selling more cheese, nearly tripling its consumption in the past four decades, the industry hasn’t been able to halt the slide in milk demand.
Alarmingly for the industry, even the most devoted milk drinkers – kids – aren’t consuming as much of the white stuff as they once did.
The share of pre-teens who didn’t drink any milk on a given day rose from 12 per cent to 24 per cent between 1978 and 2008, according to a 2013 report from the US Department of Agriculture. During the same time, the share of pre-teens who drank milk three times or more a day dropped from 31 per cent to 18 per cent.
«It’s kind of the younger generation we’ve lost,» said KJ Burrington of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Centre for Dairy Research.
To a growing number of consumers, milk isn’t the nutritional touchstone it once was, even though it fulfils key nourishment needs.
«It’s really one of our best sources of vitamin D and calcium,» said Deb Sheats, a nutrition and dietetics professor at St Catherine University. Vitamin D and calcium are important nutrients that often left out in diets.
Cheese is also an excellent source of calcium. But cheese is often more fattening than milk, and doesn’t pack the same vitamin D punch.
Enter the «plant» milks – soy, almond and so on. They’re not really milk, but they are marketed that way.
Through fortification, plant milks have just as much if not more calcium and vitamin D as dairy milk, and sometimes fewer calories – though they are more expensive.
«They are riding the coattails of milk’s nutritional profile,» said Marin Bozic, a professor of dairy marketing economics at the University of Minnesota. «They try to place themselves as a substitute for dairy milk.»
Plant milk is indeed a health play for packaged food makers.
«Soy and almond milk manufacturers will benefit as more Americans become health conscious and are more willing to spend money on healthy beverages,» according to a recent report by market researcher IBISWorld.
Some consumers have been concerned about growth hormones used in dairy cows, IBISWorld found. Others have questioned the premise of drinking cows’ milk altogether, Antal Neville, an IBISWorld analyst, said in an email interview.
«Some consumers have definitely questioned the health halo of milk in recent years,» he wrote.
Source: Yahoo