Rising demand for non-dairy milk alternatives has Australian nut industries excited about a potentially lucrative new market.
In the United States, sales of almond milk have overtaken soy milk, and the Australian macadamia industry has just launched a range of macadamia milks to try to claim their share of a health conscious big-spending market.
In Australian supermarkets, shelves that once stocked long life milk, and perhaps a small range of soy milks, are now brimming with a huge variety of non-dairy milk products, including oat milk, rice milk, coconut milk, and increasingly a range of nut-based drinks, like almond, cashew and macadamia milk.
Nicolas Raiber, senior brand manager with Patons macadamia company, has just returned from the United States where the market for non-dairy milk drinks is huge and growing. He observed, “The US is probably five to eight years ahead of us in terms of the non-dairy category, especially the milk. What I saw is just amazing. Still almond and soy are probably the two main products that you will see on a shelf, but I came back with samples of quinoa milk, hazelnut milk, cashew, hemp (milk), so it’s just amazing the number of products that they are launching.”
Non-dairy market share
Figures from Retail World for 2014, show sales of non-dairy milk products were worth $171.9 million, up 6.9 per cent on the previous year, while traditional milk sales were worth $2 billion, up 1.3 per cent.
Tim Jackson, marketing manager with almond company, Almondco Australia, has been surprised that customer are willing to pay up to $4 a litre for a product that is about 90 per cent water.
Dairy Australia consumer marketing manager Glenys Zucco said “We know that from the recent Australian health survey that on the day of the survey 68 per cent of Australians had cow’s milk and only 3 per cent were having soy, or other alternatives, so it really is a small part of the market,”
She added that while non-dairy products may be labelled as “milk”, they did not have the same characteristics.
Nicolas Raiber, of Patons, said when the company launched its macadamia milk in Canada later this month, it would not be allowed to call it milk due to Canadian regulations on labelling of non-dairy products. Instead, it will be sold as a macadamia beverage or drink. Dairy Australia believes Australia should consider similar regulations.
Consumer group Choice said consumers needed to be aware that milk alternatives were not always nutritionally equivalent to cow’s milk, with rice milk much lower in protein, and almond milk often not calcium-fortified.
