Last week, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) wrote in a viral tweet that “Pennsylvania’s dairy farmers are at the heart of our community and critical to our economy,” adding that he is working to make DAIRY PRIDE Act, which would “Protect our dairy farmers by banning non-dairy products from using dairy names.”
However, many were quick to point out how ridiculous the premise of the bill was.
‘John Fetterman apparently thinks consumers are idiots’ responded Paul Sherman, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. “Everyone knows that ‘almond milk’ is not a dairy product.”
“Senator, that bill makes it illegal to market ‘coconut milk’ as ‘coconut milk’.” added Shoshana Weissmann, digital director of the R Street Institute, a libertarian think tank. “That’s crazy.”
The DAIRY PRIDE Act, which was reintroduced in March after an initial attempt in 2021, would prevent plant-based products from using terms commonly associated with dairy in their brand names. So if the bill passes, phrases like “oat milk,” “soy yogurt” and “plant-based cheese” will be off-limits, forcing manufacturers to resort to tricky terms like “oat drink” when labeling their products.
The bill was reintroduced in response to a decision by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February to allow manufacturers of most plant-based dairy alternatives to continue labeling their products as “milk.” The decision, according to the FDA draft guidelinewas created because the agency found that consumers consistently understood that plant-based milks are not dairy products.
Unsurprisingly, dairy producers weren’t too happy with the new rules – and neither were dairy advocates.
“The decision to allow such beverages to inappropriately use dairy terminology violates the FDA’s own standards of identity, which clearly defines dairy terms as animal products,” the National Milk Producers Federation wrote in February rack. “We reject the agency’s circular logic that FDA’s past inaction on labeling now justifies labeling such beverages as ‘milk’ by designating a generic and common name.”
“For far too long, plant-based products with starkly different nutritional values have been falsely masquerading as dairy,” said Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) in a statement press release following the reintroduction of the DAIRY PRIDE Act. “This unfair branding is misleading to consumers and a disservice to the dairy farmers who have dedicated their lives to making milk, cheese, yogurt, ice cream and more nutritious products.”
However, these concerns are exaggerated and obscure the real motivation behind calls to limit labeling of plant-based products: the desire to limit economic competition for dairy farmers.
According to the Plant Based Foods Institute, an industry organization, 40.6 percent of U.S. households reported purchasing plant-based milk by 2022, and 15 percent of all milk purchased in the U.S. is now plant-based. From 2019 to 2022, dollar sales of plant-based milk increased from $2.0 billion to $2.8 billion per year. On the other hand, the consumption of cow’s milk has increased decreasing for decades.
Contrary to the pro-dairy talk, it’s simply not true that consumers are particularly confused by plant-based milk labeling. According to a 2018 questionnaire75 percent of respondents understood that soy milk and almond milk did not contain cow’s milk, while only 9 percent said the drinks contained dairy.
In fact, “milk” has been used to describe plant-based alternatives for centuries. According to Smithsonian magazine, recipes Evoking almond milk was popular in medieval cookbooks, where the drink was often used as an alternative to cow’s milk during Lent.
Furthermore, concerns that using “milk” to describe plant-based dairy alternatives could confuse consumers about the nutritional value of the beverages are also misplaced. While it is true that most plant-based milks (with the exception of soy milk) contain much less protein and calcium per serving than cow’s milk, this information is hardly hidden from the consumer; this is stated on the nutrition label of each product.
Even though dairy farmers and their political allies have an idea of it, plant-based milk is here to stay, and unfair regulations are unlikely to change that.