The dairy case is getting more and more crowded all the time, as a wide array of milk substitutes fight for shelf space among real dairy products.
Cow's milk has been able to play fair against this new competition by touting benefits not found in soy, almond or other milk alternatives. However, when a company making an oat-based beverage took to bashing cow's milk in its advertisements, one dairy group in Sweden said enough is enough and took legal action.
Last October, LRF Mjölk, Sweden's dairy lobby, filed a lawsuit against Oatly, a company that uses a blend of oats and water as the base for its line of creamers, yogurt and frozen desserts. Since Oatly hired Toni Peterson as its chief executive officer in 2012, the company has been ruthless in its jabs against dairy to promote its own product line.
"Like milk, but made for humans" is how the company describes its oat-based foods, and its cartons are branded with slogans such as "No milk. No soy. No badness." On the company's website, a T-shirt available for sale carries the tagline "We are the postmilk generation."
One might expect negative consequences for a relatively small company facing such a lawsuit. However, as the saying goes, "All press is good press," and Oatly certainly found that to be true. Since their name made headlines for this legal conflict last fall, sales of Oatly's dairy alternatives have soared 37 percent already this year, Bloomberg Business reported. Oatly currently sells products in two dozen European and Asian countries, and revenue for this year is expected to top $41 million.
No matter how this lawsuit ends, Oatly has already benefited from the extra attention surrounding milk alternatives, and oat milk is not alone on this trajectory of growth. Sales of all dairy substitutes in Europe topped $1.5 billion in 2014, and milk alternatives made up 8 percent of all milk sales in the United States in 2013.
While these low blows against cow's milk seem unfair, no one can deny that more consumers around the world are reaching for milk alternatives. A true test for the dairy industry will be to find its own way to turn press from this instance and others into opportunities to promote the dairy products we all know and love.
(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2016
June 1, 2015
