Plant-based milk may soon fill half of all drinks in Australian cafes as dairy alternatives skyrocket in popularity, with oat milk leading the charge.
Barista Daylen Tuckford started working at a cafe in Williams, Western Australia, two years ago. In that time, they've seen oat milk arrive and watched its popularity boom.
"Probably a year or so ago — halfway through the year I think — oat milk just started really taking over," they said.
A survey of more than 900 cafes found a quarter of Australians chose plant milk in 2021 and that the most popular option was almond, followed by soy and oat.
Cafe market analyst Sean Edwards said plant milk was on track to capture half the cafe drinks market in the next few years, and oat could soon be Australia's top-selling dairy alternative.
"Two years ago oat milk was 0.2 per cent, now it's 20 per cent of the market," Mr Edwards said.
"It's mostly because when people try oat they see the silkiness and smoothness of the drink. It emulates dairy better than most other plant milks."
Glass half full?
While oat milk's creamy texture and mild flavour may have endeared it to customers, dairy farmers were less impressed.
"It's falsifying a product to make it seem like a product which is popular. You don't win the market otherwise," WAFarmers dairy president Ian Noakes said.
Despite years of campaigning from the dairy industry, plant-based milks are not restricted from using dairy terms like "milk" and "creamy" in their labelling.
This February, a Senate inquiry recommended the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission restrict the use of meat labels like "beef", "pork" or "chicken" for plant protein products but stopped short of recommending dairy descriptors be restricted.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows Australians' dairy milk consumption is relatively steady despite plant milk's 43 per cent rise over three years.
Mr Edwards said plant milk's rapid growth wasn't coming at the expense of dairy.
"I don't think dairy has lost ground in volume, but they've lost market share," he said.
Nonetheless, Mr Noakes said dairy farmers were concerned by the shifting trend.
"There's no doubt that people have moved away from dairy because of a perception of carbon [emissions]," he said.
"But as an industry we're working very hard to lower our carbon footprint.
"To those people I would say give us a break. We will get there."
Farm to coffee
The sharp rise in oat milk sales has opened the door for Australian farmers and processors to jump onboard.
Late last year, Wide Open Agriculture secured $20 million to build WA's first oat milk processing facility in Perth.
While the oats it uses in its milk product are grown and milled in WA, the processing took place in Italy before milk was shipped back to Australian supermarkets and cafes.
Chief executive Ben Cole said the Perth facility was the final step necessary to producing oat milk entirely within the state.
"It's [about] provenance and risk management. You don't have long supply chains, you don't have currency disruptions or disruptions related to pandemics and now war in Europe," he said.
Steven Ford, one of two WA farmers selling oats to Wide Open Agriculture for oat milk, expected many more farms would be needed to supply the new facility.
His oats are sold at a premium and marketed as "regeneratively grown" because he farms with fewer pesticides and fungicides than most WA farms.
"If the consumer wants plant-based milks, if they can be grown in WA and processed in WA and create opportunities for WA people, that's a great thing," he said.
"If those premiums are there and are large enough it will give us farmers the opportunities to perhaps investigate these principles of farming further and produce food with perhaps more integrity.
A learning curve
Plant milk's surge in popularity has coincided with significant investment in making it tastier and easier to use in cafes.
Michael Perich is chief executive of Noumi, which sells dairy, lactose-free and plant-based milk under the Milklab and Australia's Own brands.
"It's a result of better processes, better technology to make sure it can be more closely aligned with a dairy milk."
Daylen Tuckford said the proliferation of plant milk was a challenge to master.
"You can really tell sometimes when you're using alternative milks. Some separate a lot easier and some brands froth a lot nicer," they said.
