Like an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population, I don’t digest lactose well, which makes the occasional latte an especially pricey proposition. So it was a pleasant surprise when, shortly after moving to San Francisco, I ordered a drink at Blue Bottle Coffee and didn’t have to ask—or pay extra—for a milk alternative. Since 2022, the once Oakland-based, now Nestlé-owned cafe chain has defaulted to oat milk, both to cut carbon emissions and because lots of its affluent-tending customers were already choosing it as their go-to.
Plant-based milks, a multibillion-dollar global market, aren’t just good for the lactose intolerant: They’re also better for the climate. Dairy cows belch a lot of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide; they contribute at least 7 percent of US methane output, the equivalent emissions of 10 million cars. Cattle need a lot of room to graze, too: Plant-based milks use about a tenth as much land to produce the same quantity of milk. And it takes almost a thousand gallons of water to manufacture a gallon of dairy milk—four times the water cost of alt-milk from oats or soy.
But if climate concerns push us toward the alt-milk aisle, dairy still has price on its side. Even though plant-based milks are generally much less resource-intensive, they’re often more expensive. Walk into any Starbucks, and you’ll likely pay around 70 cents extra for nondairy options.
. Dairy’s affordability edge, explains María Mascaraque, an analyst at market research firm Euromonitor International, relies on the industry’s ability to produce “at larger volumes, which drives down the cost per carton.” American demand for milk alternatives, though expected to grow by 10 percent a year through 2030, can’t beat those economies of scale. (Globally, alt-milks aren’t new on the scene—coconut milk is even mentioned in the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, which is thousands of years old.)
What else contributes to cow milk’s dominance? Dairy farmers are “political favorites,” says Daniel Sumner, a University of California, Davis, agricultural economist. In addition to support like the “Dairy Checkoff,” a joint government-industry program to promote milk products (including the “Got Milk?” campaign), they’ve long raked in direct subsidies currently worth around $1 billion a year.
Big Milk fights hard to maintain those benefits, spending more than $7 million a year on lobbying. That might help explain why the US Department of Agriculture has talked around the climate virtues of meat and dairy alternatives, refusing to factor sustainability into its dietary guidelines—and why it has featured content, such as a 2013 article by then–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, trumpeting the dairy industry as “leading the way in sustainable innovation.”
But the USDA doesn’t directly support plant-based milk. It does subsidize some alt-milk ingredients—soybean producers, like dairy, net close to $1 billion a year on average, but that crop largely goes to feeding meat- and dairy-producing livestock and extracting oil. A 2021 report by industry analysts Mintec Limited and Frost Procurement Adventurer also notes that, while the inputs for dairy (such as cattle feed) for dairy are a little more expensive than typical plant-milk ingredients, plant alternatives face higher manufacturing costs. Alt-milk makers, Sumner says, may also have thinner profit margins: Their “strategy for growth is advertisement and promotion and publicity,” which isn’t cheap.
Starbucks, though, does benefit from economies of scale. In Europe, the company is slowly dropping premiums for alt-milks, a move it attributes to wanting to lower corporate emissions. “Market-level conditions allow us to move more quickly” than other companies, a spokesperson for the coffee giant told me, but didn’t say if or when the price drop would happen elsewhere.
In the United States, meanwhile, it’s a waiting game to see whether the government or corporations drive down alt-milk costs. Currently, Sumner says, plant-based milk producers operate under an assumption that “price isn’t the main thing” for their buyers—as long as enough privileged consumers will pay up, alt-milk can fill a premium niche. But it’s going to take a bigger market than that to make real progress in curbing emissions from food.
Are you suggesting cow’s milk is more sustainable/ecological than any plant milk?
No, they’re suggesting that Nestle is probably acting in bad faith by attempting to close a monopolistic gap rather than genuinely doing something for the betterment of the world
Moving to plant-based milks would be a net positive for the world, right?
Again, you’re dissenting on something that wasn’t asserted. If that’s your opinion, then that’s your opinion, and that’s fine. But, if there’s a conflict of interest in a study, then we have reason to doubt the results are legitimate. This is what the comment was saying, and that’s drastically far from a total conclusion one way or the other.
Your question also suggests there’s one correct answer, which just plane isn’t true. It makes more ecological sense for some people to consume milk products in favor of plant based just based on location alone.
I don’t think that’s ever true.
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
What you eat has a far larger impact on ecology/GHGs than where it comes from.
Why aren’t you responding to the topic of the thread? What you responded to was not the heart of my comment nor was it the point I was trying to get across to you.
Do you think Nestle is acting in good faith?
You really insisted on steering the conversation toward this study, yet it’s largely flawed. I know I’m taking the bait, but as someone who grew up on a farm in a rural community, several red flags were very apparent. What they are talking about are gross emissions, that’s what’s measured by carbon capture. What these types of measurements don’t consider, is how much CO2 the immediate environment is going to recapture and make use of. Cattle and buffalo before them have been a part of the north American prairies for thousands of years, and the cycle has always been the bovine graze on the grass, which spurs regrowth, aided by the gasses emitted by the bovine after eating said grass.
I believe they’re being selective about where they’re measuring their data as well, because it does not make sense for land use change to be a factor in the vast majority of cases for grass fed cattle. Again, this is why location matters, cattle do well on grassland. It also makes no sense for the emissions of machinery to be coupled in the data with the emissions of cattle. It’s also virtually impossible for the machinery emissions to be that low for wheat and rye specifically, because I know first hand how many diesel tank refills it takes get the seeding done alone, let alone the constant maintenance it takes afterwards. It doesn’t take any machinery to raise grassland cattle there but it sure does take machinery to farm grains, farmers have heavy machinery in their fields constantly. You have to plow the field, disc, harrow, spray herbicide, spray pesticide, seed the crop, spray fertilizer, roll the peas, swath the canola, harvest all of it with a massive machine, all while a cow chills watching from the next field over lol.
My guess is that they’re referring to warehouse cattle, which don’t exist everywhere (outright illegal in Canada I think). This is why it matters where it comes from. Can’t really verify any of their data either since the source studies are behind a pay wall.
I’d also even say there’s far more to ecology than raw emissions. Almond production has been a massive hindrance on California’s water supply, They’re prone to drought already, and they’re still mass producing almonds while in a drought right now. Regardless of emissions, we would be actively contributing to an ongoing crisis if we increased plant milk demand. To do so out of ecological principle would be incredibly ironic. But, that seems to be what encouraging plant based milk over cattle has done.
Third party here, if we want to be fair and acknowledge that some milk supplies are worse than others, let’s also acknowledge that nut milks are notoriously water intensive as opposed to a grain based milk like oat. But I’ll heartily agree that water rights, management, and surrounding legal actions in California are… nuts (bu dum tsss) right now.