Year In Review: Alternative Dairy

The following insights are powered by Nielsen in partnership with Unioncrate, an artificial intelligence demand planning platform that combines consumer behavior and historical shipment data to predict sales and inventory with up to 91.6% SKU-level accuracy.

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Welcome to Day 6 of Unioncrate’s Year In Review. Today we take a look at the Alternative Dairy category, which saw 19.6% YOY growth in 2020.

Alternative Dairy

• Alternative dairy wasn’t an alternative choice during the pandemic; since March, the category has grown 22.1%.

• Oat milk reigned as the top subcategory this year, with overall growth of 225.9% since March, and numbers as high as 429.4% in a single 4-week period during the pandemic. 

• All milks are not created equal—rice milk and soy milk were not consumer favorites, seeing decreases of 8% and 1.7%, respectively. 

Alternative Dairy, Mainstream News

• Chloe’s Pops loved oat milk so much they brought it to dessert, launching a line of frozen oat milk pops that look delicious even on a cold day. 

• Frozen dessert brand Dream Pops used dairy substitutes to bring us Dream Bites, the perfect bite of vegan chocolate and coconut cream each time. 

• Táche introduced pistachio milk, signaling a promising future for all the other milk sources still yet-to-be-discovered.

• Israeli startup Remilk skipped the plants altogether and used microbes to create a milk alternative designed to be identical to its cow-sourced cousin, just..without the cows.

Up Next: Frozen Vegetables