Innovate and Educate

Consumer education is a necessity for the alternative and premium milk sector: Americans are drinking less dairy milk, but it’s still the product they’re most familiar with. For A2, a New Zealand-based dairy company that sells milk that’s free of the A1 protein that many people find difficult to digest, health benefits are a way into the fast-growing but hypercompetitive alternative-dairy market.

Milk, said Blake Waltrip, the chief executive of A2, is a “repertoire purchasing category”: The average consumer has three to four different types of milk or milk alternatives in their rotation. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all just milk. Which means that these companies need to constantly be innovating to recapture consumers’ interests.

For A2, health benefits are an easy sell. “People care more about what the product does for them than about getting deep into the science,” said Mr. Waltrip. In Australia, A2 accounts for 11 percent of all milk sales, and the company claims that 70 percent of their consumers have no milk intolerance at all. Mr. Waltrip believes it’s because theirs is a “better milk,” but it also may be that consumers, long confused about whether or not dairy milk is good for them, are relieved to have a “healthy” dairy milk to buy.

Finding new ways to market and process milk has become essential for dairy farmers looking to turn things around. But some are thinking of making bigger changes to their production.

Lorraine Lewandrowski, a dairy farmer and attorney in Central New York, said a number of New York dairy farmers have been looking to Canada for advice. She tweets about this often from her account, @NYFarmer.