I’m more of a sweetened almond gal – Holly
The secret is that they made it a good alternative, not a replacement!
This month I am plugging the St. Louis chapter of the AMA. To become a member, you can visit https://amasaintlouis.org/.
SOURCES
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/482758/what-a-massive-blind-taste-test-of-vegan-milk-cheese-and-ice-cream-found-explained-in-one-chart https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/409175/meat-plant-based-blind-taste-test https://abcnews.com/Health/WellnessNews/story?id=8450036 https://www.nahrungsmittel-intoleranz.com/en/lactose-intolerance-worldwide-distribution/ https://minimalistbaker.com/make-oat-milk/ https://thebananadiaries.com/how-to-make-oat-milk-non-slimy/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0733521024002157 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10877596/ https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/393919/beyond-meat-decreasing-marketing-budget-for-2024-a.html https://stockdividendscreener.com/packaged-foods/beyond-meat-versus-peers-in-advertising-spending/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
You might not know this about me, but I’m a vegetarian and have been for nearly 14 years. I’m not an evangelist for a plant-based diet – I understand we live in a meat-eating world! – but I decided many years ago that a plant-based diet was the best choice for me for my health, my personal values and for the environment.
But when I started on this vegetarian journey, I had a really hard time at first because a lot of the foods I was used to eating – fried chicken, burgers, hot dogs and steak – all had some pretty lousy meatless alternatives. Call these what you want – fake meat, faux meats, mock meats, meatless entrees or whatever else you like – but most of them were pretty awful and didn’t taste like meat, didn’t have the mouthfeel of meat and weren’t as filling as meat. There’s nothing quite so awful as a gardenburger or a Boca burger, and even if I’m faced with nothing else to eat, I’ll usually turn those down in a heartbeat.
I’d occasionally find a brand that made one or two things I liked, and then they’d go out of business or stop selling it anyplace I could get it. A few brands like Gardein, Morningstar Farms, Quorn, Tofurkey and Lightlife have some OK products, but most of them wouldn’t fool a meat eater.
Over time, though, faux meats have gotten a lot better. Two brands that really rose to prominence are Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, both of which have some close approximates to certain types of meat. Impossible’s burger patty is good enough that it’s served at Burger King in their Impossible Whopper, and Beyond has some good brats that aren’t quite like the real thing, but are pretty close. Both brands also have decent chicken nuggets, and Gardein’s developed a fried chicken patty-style fillet and some fried fish-style planks that are decent enough.
But you know who’s not buying it? Consumers, and over time, I’ve watched the faux meat section in grocery stores swell up with all the new choices and then shrink down to just a handful of options as meatless has fallen out of favor as protein-rich carnivore diets have come in vogue. Consumers are likewise uninterested in plant-based cheeses, eggs and ice cream, often feeling that these products are inferior in taste, mouthfeel, odor and appearance.
10 years ago, there was a lot of talk about how plant-based meats were going to become a cheap, healthier, environmentally friendly alternative to meat that most people would happily eat; today, hardly anyone sees a path forward for these brands beyond serving the 10% of people who are vegetarians and vegans.
But there is one plant-based product that’s doing really well even among meat-eaters, and that’s Oat Milk. This is particularly interesting because Oat Milk has had a lot less of a marketing push than faux meats and has also been on normal grocery store shelves for far less time. And yet it’s possible Oat Milk could one day become a viable alternative to cow’s milk that most people are willing to accept as a substitute or even consume as their primary milk product – that could be a big change for the dairy aisle overall.
So let’s talk about why Oat Milk is succeeding while plant-based meats, cheeses and eggs are failing to capture public enthusiasm.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
The idea of plant-based milk is hardly new; in fact, oat milk itself has been around since the 1990s manufactured by the Swedish brand Oatly, which primarily operated in Europe until expanding into the United States in the late 2010s along with a major push in the UK to position oat milk as an alternative to other plant-based milks such as soy milk.
Oatly is not the only brand of oat milk on the market, and there are plenty of competitors and store brands. But it is the company most associated with coffee shops, where it’s made its biggest marketing push to gain widespread acceptance. In fact, Oatly makes a special version of its product specifically for coffee shops called “Barista Edition” that doubles the milk fat, making it comparable to whole milk from a cow and superior for espressos and lattes compared to other plant-based milks.
One of the reasons that oat milk became so popular in coffee shops is because it really does taste like cow’s milk, and some consumers even prefer the taste of it because it has a richer, creamier texture than a lot of the supermarket milks and fares very well in taste tests against premium brands like Horizon Organic. One blind taste test conducted by the nonprofit NECTAR – and reported in an article by Vox – asked over 2000 consumers to try out a number of faux dairy products like ice creams, creamers, sour creams, butters, yogurts, cheeses and milks. 92% of the people in the sample reported a standard omnivorous diet, so they didn’t seed the sample with vegetarians and vegans.
In the study, the preference for plant-based dairy products was roughly 35% while roughly 65% of all consumers preferred the traditional dairy version. But in an interesting twist, several of the categories saw a parity between the top-ranked dairy-free product and the traditional dairy products, particularly creamers, sour cream, barista milk regular milk and ice cream. Oat milk-derived dairy-free products were the reason why.
By the way, the least-convincing products were dairy-free cheeses. Sorry, vegan listeners who’d love to get us off cheese made from animal milk, but we’re just not there yet.
Nor are we there with faux meats, because another study conducted by NECTAR last year found that, on average, animal meats were preferred at least 60-80% of the time in almost all categories, particularly for bacon, pulled pork, meatballs, ham and turkey. The most competitive category? Unbreaded chicken fillets, mainly because consumers didn’t like the meat options much better than the meatless ones.
But there is some psychology at play here. If you tell people they are eating a substitute for an actual product they enjoy, they tend to be biased against it and even have natural somatic reactions as they attempt to consume it that can make them chew differently, gag or try to overcome the sensation of eating something fake by chasing it with a bite of another food or washing it down with a drink.
I had this very reaction myself when I started eating meatless products – I knew they weren’t meat and my body didn’t want to treat them like meat. I even had stomachaches after eating them and would feel my mouth getting dry sometimes when I saw them on my plate.
All of this was in my head. I eat this stuff all the time now, and the trick for me was distracting myself while eating faux meats so that I wasn’t thinking about it. If I was reading a book or watching a show while I ate, my brain was distracted and I could eat properly. Eventually, I got used to it and I didn’t have the problem anymore. And research suggests that this somatic reaction may taint taste tests if consumers are aware they’re eating a substitute for something real, because they expect the substitutes to taste bad.
But at the same time, consumers are not going to self-actualize themselves just to eat plant proteins unless there are no other choices and they’re forced to. If we had a global beef shortage and Beyond and Impossible were the only viable alternatives, I’ll bet a lot of people would get used to eating them and even begin to like them. This has happened throughout human history – how else do you explain people from the Depression era enjoying foods like liver, tongue and headcheese? – but at the grocery store, people purchase things based on desire, not subsistence.
And no matter how good plant-based foods are or the benefits they provide, it will take people wanting to eat them to make them palatable.
Which brings us back to Oat Milk. Why is this product succeeding and becoming a viable category in the dairy aisle while other plant-based products are failing?
Believe it or not, it has to do with milk itself. You see, a lot of people cannot actually digest cow’s milk – around 60% of adults lack the lactase enzyme needed to break down lactose, which in the main sugar in milk produced by mammals. Undigested sugars sit in the gut and start to ferment, creating cramping, bloating, nausea and runs to the bathroom.
And this is a that may be genetic, may be due to our gut biomes or may be due to the way we process milk in the United States, because in other parts of the world, human adults vary in their ability to digest lactose. Native Americans, Africans and Asians are among the least likely to be able to do it, and Scandinavian people are among the most likely.
Guess what doesn’t have lactose? Oat milk and other plant-based milks.
And while oat milk is not the healthiest plant-based milk – Soy milk and pea-based milk are both far more nutritious – it is relatively free of allergens, doesn’t make people feel bloated, pairs really well with flavors like chocolate or coffee and isn’t prohibitively expensive. It’s also relatively low in calories and which is naturally sweet but doesn’t require added sugar, which makes it one of those products that’s easily recommended for most diets.
Oat milk is also not the sort of product that feels like it was made in a lab. It’s literally made from soaking rolled oats in water, blending them and then draining the milk out through a cloth to separate out the pulpy residue. It’s not mysterious and doesn’t involve a lot of chemical processes. In fact, you can make oat milk at home if you really want to, though it won’t be as shelf-stable as the stuff you can get at the store. Most of the commercial oat milks are also fortified with additional vitamins and minerals, so many home recipes add ingredients to make up for that.
Oat milk has gained a reputation for being good for the environment in terms of water footprint and greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to soy milk and far better for the environment than rice, almond or cashew milk.
There’s another benefit, too, and it’s that oat milk doesn’t look, smell or taste that different from dairy milk, which means it can get past the somatic reaction that causes people to feel like they’re consuming an imposter product.
And this is where we can turn to marketing for a moment to also explain the success of oat milk. For quite a long time, the dairy section has been mostly focused on cow’s milk with a tiny sliver of alternative milk products for people who are vegan or lactose intolerant. Brands such as Silk have occupied that niche, but they’d always focused on being a milk-alike, similar to faux meats, not a product that can compete as a true milk alternative.
Because Oatly and other oat milk manufacturers have predominantly focused on pairing oat milk with coffee perceptually, there’s a natural association between a positive, energetic, pleasurable morning routine beverage and enhancing the flavor and benefits of the coffee with oat milk. Baristas love to show off how they can get it to foam and froth just like cow’s milk, and it generally doesn’t add any extra cost or tradeoff to the beverage. There’s a novelty in trying it, but no real stigma or premium to pay to continue using it.
And people like it. That’s really the most important thing.
When you consider the tens of millions of dollars Beyond Meat and Impossible have spent advertising their products to reach a point where they’re basically falling from fad into a niche category, oat milk, which has mostly found acceptance through word of mouth and social media chatter, looks pretty amazing by comparison.
And it goes to show that when you’re fighting to win the hearts and minds of consumers, trying to offer a fake alternative to the real thing is far more of an uphill battle than simply creating a nice alternative that people genuinely like for what it is.
My recommendation to Impossible and Beyond? Start making products that are undeniably good on their own merits and which don’t need to be viewed as knockoffs. It’s a lot more work, but it will also create a far more sustainable market for you.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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