I had to kill some time in the supermarket, so I parked myself in front of the dairy aisle. And for the first time I seriously looked at all the different milk substitutes. The big 5 were Cashew, Almond, Coconut, Soy, and Flax. Then there are all the mixtures of those as well. Coconut Almond, Almond Cashew, Soy and Cashew, etc.
Currently I explain to people who are not vegan that plant milk currently costs 2X regular milk. If you are on a very tight budget, maybe this choice right now is not for you. For example the gallons of 1% I have bought over the years for a long time now have hovered around the $4.00 mark. The average half gallon of plant based milk-like material, also sells for $4.00, exactly half as much volume.
But in that case there were some interesting factors. For example, usually I make it a point not to buy plant based milk over $3.00. Except for one week when no one had anything on sale, that has been possible. But there is some serious economic competition between Blue Diamond Brands and SIlk. The grocery store sales flip every other week it seems like and usually one or the other brand is around $3.00. Sometimes when not, Heartland brand Flax Milk goes on sale and we still hit that $3.00 limit.
At giant Supercenters that have no sales, the generic "store brand" runs around $2.60 for almond and creeps up to $3.25 for the high end of plant milks: cashew. But most stores find it simpler to sell all one brand's variety of flavors and textures at the same consistent price.
So in the practical reality, I'm paying $6.00 a gallon (see what I did there?) for plant milk (even though its normal listed price would be $8.00 a gallon), and $3.99 (almost $4.00) for the store brand of 1%... roughly $2.00 more for every gallon of plant milk I buy.
As I said above, this was the store brand of generic 1% milk. The other brands, ones that were delivered in trucks bearing their dairies names, unaffiliated with my supermarket chain, were at $6.50 a gallon. The organic certified cows milks were between $7.50 and $8.00..
If you wanted "good" cows milk, you would have to pay the same as you would for plant based concoctions.
The writing is on the wall. Just as fracking lowered gas prices for all by increasing the supply and pushed out coal as an power plant energy option, the advent of plant milk’s popularity has cut into the demand for milk products. U.S. farmers, along with dairy producers in other exporting countries, are suffering through a 55 per cent drop in global dairy prices since 2014, caused primarily by a worldwide glut of skim milk.
Besides the encroachment of plant milks, consumers are also consuming more butter now that their health concerns over that product were alleviated, which contrary to popular belief does not use more milk. It uses more milk-fat, leaving the growing glut of skim milks to weigh down all milk prices across the markets.
The recent spat with Canada illustrates how Gordian Knotted our milk price structure is. Trump was extolling Canada's within-the-rules tariffs used to protect Canadian farmers, but Trump seems to not know that Canadian milk farmers must get ALL their income solely from selling product. American farmers get much of their profits from subsidies. American agriculture subsidies act like a tariff in that they keep out foreign products which now appear much higher in price when compared to the subsidies that American farmers used to sell their milk artificially below production costs. "These subsidies represent about 40 per cent of U.S. dairy farmer incomes.
Bottom line, with subsidies forcing down American milk prices, ... plant milk is more expensive. Remove them, and the price is equal or plant milk becomes the cheaper. This marks a consumer turning point where more people will now decide to try plant milks for their first time.
American dairy farming is going away soon. The average age of dairy farmers in Connecticut now is a high 58... That is the average, meaning half of dairy farmers are older than that.
Silk and Blue Diamond have been around a long time. I know, I never bought into them because of price points. It was a luxury like lactose free milk that I didn't need so didn't spend. But now that they have reached parity with subsidized dairy farming, the wind's have changed.
When I told my vegan daughter my economic prediction that veganism was here to stay and possibly in her lifetime we might become a nation that would eat 99% plant-based diets, she informed me, that one of New York's most prestigious and largest East Coast dairies, had just thrown out their cows completely and switched to manufacturing plant milks.