'Move over Veganuary - it's time for Februdairy and promoting British farmers'

The problem is that, held back by those low-margins, milk has been slow to adapt to the trends and desires of a new generation of consumers.

Two-litre cartons of milk and those ugly metal trolleys of milk we see in the supermarket are not desirable. But dairy can adapt and succeed.

Despite headlines about veganism and the growth in sales of ‘milk’ alternatives, the market for cow’s milk is evolving, not disappearing.

More than 80 per cent of people still regularly consume cow’s milk.

That is still a huge market that the dairy sector has been poor at capitalising on. Those businesses that are adapting are benefiting. People are paying more to buy branded and innovative milk products.

Take the fermented milk brand Bio-tiful Kefir. It is a drinkable product halfway between milk and yoghurt. A 250ml bottle retails at £1 and its biggest consumer base, according to its founder Natasha Bowes, is slimming women. Exactly the consumer most likely to be avoiding dairy.

It is now sold across UK supermarkets and has just expanded its capacity to 16m bottles a year.

Milk as a word does not necessarily matter to a new generation of consumers. It is the product being made with it that matters.

That is what people are willing to buy and pay more for. They are not paying more for milk. They are paying more for Bio-tiful Kefir.

Priority

Today, the urgent priority must be to turn milk into a valuable and desirable product, one people are willing to prioritise spending that little bit extra on.

That is the only sustainable future for the category and the best vehicle for that is brands.

Branded milk is not green, red or blue-top milk. A brand is a unique product produced by a particular business under a particular name.

Others would be Graham’s Gold Jersey, specialist milk-for-coffee brand The Estate Dairy, or Fairlife, the Coca-Cola-owned milk brand that started in the US in 2014 and has now expanded to Canada.

Branded milk is already driving growth in the liquid milk category, with value sales up 4.4 per cent and volumes up 52 per cent in 2017. But it is a still a hugely underdeveloped market, with less than 20 per cent of the milk sold today branded. The rest is unlabelled and undervalued.

So why are brands successful?

Because they are the ones innovating.

And by that I mean producing new milk drink products that consumers are willing to pay more for.

The focus of the dairy industry today should be on promoting and supporting new approaches by entrepreneurs and dairy firms to adding value to milk.

That means creating desirable milk drink products that provide a specific taste, health or nutritional benefit and capture consumers’ changing eating habits, interests and lifestyles.