The Case For Oatmilk
The Oatly’s Barista Edition is the product that originated the hype among New York’s baristas, with it’s incredible ability to foam better than many other plant milk alternatives.
“We have had to search for a lot of different products, for him, oat milk was the best [nutritional] source because he also didn’t tolerate soy,” says dietitian Megan Lott whose two-year-old son is severely allergic to dairy. Lott is also the deputy director of the recently published research study “Healthy Drinks Healthy Kids” from Duke University’s Healthy Eating Research Program in which the generalized conclusion is that parents to children below the age of five should not replace cow’s milk with plant milk.
The issue is not that children need dairy milk according to Lott, a child in those crucial developmental years of early childhood can be sufficiently nurtured without consuming dairy at all. “But in the US that is not typically what you see, we see a high reliance on cow’s milk,” says Lott. In just a few years the plant-based alternatives to milk have flooded the market, the sales have grown with 6 percent or 1.9 billion dollars in the past year, and it now makes up 13 percent of the entire milk category according to SPINS research.
The reason for this spike in sales can be tracked to increased consumer awareness, as the factory farming of dairy contributes to huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. A 2018 Oxford University study showed that any kind of non-dairy milk will have at least three times less of an environmental impact than dairy. Oat milk, which has a lower carbon footprint than any of the other non-dairy alternatives, is one of the newer additions to the US milk market. The company that has caused an oat milk craze is the milk-rebel Oatly.
The Swedish oat milk company, has since its launch on the American market a few years ago created a faithful following among coffee enthusiasts. They call their followers the “post-milk-generation,” and every year they publish a sustainability report in which they dissect their efforts to have a lower impact on the climate.
Abigail Pfeffer, a barista on the Upper East Side café Perk, who moved to New York from Massachusetts, remembers her first introduction to the brand. “New York is so up on trends, and that is why it is so common here, but in more rural areas it is totally absent, which is so weird to me,” she says while steaming milk for another oat latte.
Bailey Arnold market developer at Oatly does not see it the increased demand as a trend, “it’s definitely really hot right now, to go from two kinds of oat milk on the market in December and by February I think there were 15 different kinds on the market. That signifies sort of a boom and a huge rise of popularity, but I wouldn’t categorize as a trend because I don’t think it’s going anywhere.”
Even though Oatly is fairly new to the US market, it’s not a new product, developed in the early 90s by scientists at Lund University who wanted to find a viable alternative for lactose-intolerant people. This makes them stand out from their competitors, most of which launched their oat milk this year. Oatly was designed to be as close to milk as possible, a one to one replacement.
Nevertheless, the Lott says the fact that there is a large gap in the research on the nutritional side of plant-milk. “Even if you are fortifying plant-based milk, we know they are not absorbed as well as they would be with cow’s milk, but we are missing specifics to know what the exact percentage of absorption,” Lott says. It is worth mentioning that the research Lott took part in chart out many different kinds of milk, but the oat milk of choice was Silk’s version of oat milk - not the veteran Oatly.
The dairy alternatives have been questioned by many. The dairy-lobby in Sweden, Svensk Mjolk, sued Oatly in 2015 for using slogans such as “it’s like milk but made for humans”, which Oatly lost. In the United States, the dairy-lobby has not gone as far as suing plant-milk companies about their branding.
However, Megan Lott, says that in their research they met a lot of parents confused about what milk they should feed their little ones. Many parents that participated in the survey distrusted dairy milk “because they have heard about hormones or maybe the environmental consequences”. But Lott stresses the fact that simply switching to any plant-based alternative will not sufficiently provide the same nutrients we tend to rely on coming from milk.
However, her overall recommendation to adults, who are less, if at all, reliant on cow’s milk for nutritionally, is “that they think about how to make sure that they have a well-rounded and balanced diet”.
Abigail Pfeffer taking a midday Oatlatte at café Perk.