6 ms·

From what it looks like reading swedish news over the years, there is no money in running a traditional farm, german milk is cheaper, danish meat is cheaper and

• draugadrotten 9y ago
  These oat-based products are popular because allergies are common. People allergic to milk and/or soy proteins can drink this milk, eat this ice-cream etc
  • Nekorosu 9y ago
    It didn't occur to me. Makes perfect sense.
  • BenjiWiebe 9y ago
    I'm allergic to oats. :(
    • Nomentatus 9y ago
      Everyone is allergic to oats (lectins) if they aren't cooked for a lot longer than the packages say. They easily cause an immune reaction that can have a (standard for infections) 3 day lag.
      • allover 9y ago
        > Everyone is allergic to oats (lectins) Sounds unlikely. Source?
        • Nomentatus 9y ago
          Your packages may have longer times, of course.
          • allover 9y ago
            I just found this article that seems to sum up my skepticism, basically it says "raw beans" can cause lectin-poisoning, not all lectins even seem to be harmful, some even seem beneficial, but some quack nutritionists are blowing "lectin-free" up into the next "gluten-free" fad: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/the-next-gluten/523686/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/the-next-...
            • Nomentatus 9y ago
              I eat a lot of cooked beans (and oats, sometimes) - lectins and other toxins are how plants defend their seed (etc, but seeds are obviously critical for reproduction.) Toxins are quite common in foods, and we deal with most of them well, even raw. Cooking was a massive advance for homo sapiens because it destroys most of these toxins, breaking up large molecules in general. Some plants have more durable toxins than others. Oats are at one extreme end of the spectrum, in good part because seeds are usually small and easier to heavily defend than, say, a root such as a carrot. It's that simple.
              • allover 9y ago
                So people might be allergic to raw oats, but almost no-one ever buys/consumes raw oats right? Maybe I just jumped the gun and assumed you were making some quack-ish comment that we're all having some kind of micro-allergy everytime we consume oats, when actually you were really just saying people are allergic to raw oats. Apologies. I just had a similar convo with someone that said 'carbs are bad because inflammation' so that probably gave me a hair trigger.
  • Double_a_92 9y ago
    But why would you then drink some product that tastes nothing like real milk? Just because it is white, sweetish and marketing people called it "<something> milk"?
    • tuukkah 9y ago
      Two broad alternatives: because it's the best substitute ("somewhat like milk in some way"), or because it's good. It's not like "milk" in "<something> milk" has to refer to the taste of, or to cow's milk at all.
      • nailer 9y ago
        Exactly. Milk means you can put it on your cereal and use it in your flat white. It doesn't mean you can turn a 50kg calf into a 500kg bull.
    • nailer 9y ago
      I agree Oatly tastes nothing like cow milk, and I'm not allergic to cow milk, and I dislike Bonsoy and most popular brands of soy milk. That said, I love oatmilk and it's now super common in third wave coffee places in London. It's thicker than regular milk and has a nice creamy taste. One of the head roasters I've spoken to at Grind group mentioned it works like this: (people who like soy and almond milk) (people who like cow and oat milk)
• Nekorosu 9y ago
  I only buy Swedish pork. It has reasonable price. But I always buy Australian beef when I want a steak. It has so much better price to quality ratio. My personal experience with the Oatly milk is absolutely the same. Looks like veganism is a thing in Sweden and provides enough demand for this business.
  • Grustaf 9y ago
    Veganism is definitely a big thing, my Danish neighbour told me when he was living there people looked at him weirdly when he showed up with meat for BBQs.
    • zapt02 9y ago
      For the record, that is not common outside of hipster doofus circles.
  • mbrock 9y ago
    I don't put milk in coffee but oat milk is just great with cereal.
• davidlumley 9y ago
  > Which makes me wonder where this demand came from. My local coffee shop trialled Oatly and as someone who usually drinks soy or almond milk, it's a really nice alternative. Much easier to work with, and tastes better too.
  • roywiggins 9y ago
    I find almond milk undrinkable in coffee, but Oatly is very good.
• lucaspiller 9y ago
  Is it possible to use oat milk (and other vegetables based milks) to make derivatives like cheese or yogurt?
  • chc 9y ago
    I don't know about oat milk specifically, but I've had yogurts made from soy, coconut and almond milk, and cheese made from almond milk and cashew milk. The yogurt is generally good if you like the base flavor of the kind of milk. The cheese is somewhat uneven in quality, with some being aggressively bland and others being pretty tasty. The best nutmilk cheeses I've found are Heidi Ho and Miyoko's Creamery. Now I'm curious to get some Oatly and try one of Miyoko's recipes with it.
  • chucky 9y ago
    Cheese in the traditional way, probably not. I think it relies on a chemical reaction that's fairly unique to lactose (and lactose is, as far as I now, a sugar unique to milk). At least I haven't seen or heard of anyone doing it (except a few biotech firms that are explicitly working on novel ways of achieving similar chemical reactions). If such a product exists it's really badly marketed (or very low volume), because I know many vegans that would pay a high premium for such a product. Yogurt is basically milk with a bacteria that eats sugar added to it. You can do that with any product similar to milk it seems. Oatly produces an oat-based yogurt, and the Swedish market has yogurts based on (at least) soy and lupine as well.
    • twobyfour 9y ago
      Isn't cheese also produced using bacterial reactions that consume the sugars and form solids from the protein? I can imagine developing strains of bacteria that could live off a different variety of sugar. The difference in proteins present in cow's milk vs. vegetable milks seems like it would present a greater obstacle.
    • chc 9y ago
      There is cultured vegan cheese, but it is a fairly premium product that doesn't get a lot of mass distribution. There's a recipe book for it called Artisan Vegan Cheese, and the woman who wrote it sells cultured vegan cheese and butter on her website and in upscale grocers like Whole Foods.
• mickronome 9y ago
  The demand come from many sources, some thinks milk is unhealthy, some have allergies, some thing it's unethical to keep animals in capture, and some actually prefer it to ordinary milk. The milk actually works nicely in coffee, and their yogurt varieties are perfectly viable replacement for milk based ones. The crème fraiche can be used as is for many uses, but for some cold sauces/dips I add a bit of very high quality olive oil, and a touch of lemon and lime to bring the acidity up in a good way. With correct proportions it's very hard to tell that the resulting sauce/dip/etc was not made out of a milk based product. My daughters best friend and her family have several food allergies and because of this I have tried most kinds of milk protein free and gluten free products. The movement among some non allergic people away from ordinary milk and gluten containing flour have actually given them much better and cheaper option that they now also can get almost anywhere.
• interfixus 9y ago
  Sweden has terrible soil. Rock with a thin layer of sandy earth on top. Only Skåne, the southernmost part, sustains really productive farming, which is probably the main reason the Swedes fought a series of succesful wars in the seventeenth century to grab it from neighbouring Denmark. Also why Swedish farmers decamped for North America in record numbers in the second part of the eighteen hundreds. About a quarter of the population emigrated. To this day, Sweden cannot feed itself - about halt its consumed foodstuff must be imported. Contrast the much smaller Denmark - sans Skåne - which is self-sustainable in that particular regard. No rocks, plenty of soil.
• Nomentatus 9y ago
  I absolutely loved the taste of Oatly milk when I could get it here, briefly. Now I'm back to goat's milk. Also very good, but not available in storable form that I know of.
• jesperlang 9y ago
  I can confirm on the high demand for this stuff. In addition, gluten-free, low-lactose, lactose-free, "super berries", raw food, are all quite popular here in Sweden. But with these trends come unreasonably high prices, it is getting quite crazy. Berries that have been found in swedish forests since forever and nobody cared about are picked up, branded as "super berries", put in fancy packaging and sold for insane prices... and people buy it. With milk substitutes, 1 liter of oatmilk being 90% water and 10% oat can cost you around $2.. oat already being ridiculously cheap otherwise (you can find it at $0.8 per kilo). So I'm making my own (easy) at $0.2 per liter :)
• vanderZwan 9y ago
  > And my personal experience with this Oatly milk, it tastes like hay. Which makes me wonder where this demand came from. Partially because quite simply not everybody has that association. People have different tastes. Of all the milk alternatives I like the oat-based ones best, and I've tried quite a few (although I also find the smell of hay quite pleasant, which probably helps on a sub-conscious level). Also, the motivation may lie elsewhere. For me, exploring alternatives to dairy was definitely based on trying to reduce my ecological footprint. However, I am lucky enough to immediately like the oat-based drinks.
• castle-bravo 9y ago
  I'm a vegan. I don't drink milk, ever. It's not about ethics or health or virtue signaling anymore: I've been vegan so long that I can't comfortably digest meat or milk and I can't stand the taste either. Sometimes I need a protein/fat/carbohydrate suspension with approximately the same viscosity as milk. The various veggie milks (rice, oat, soy, almond, and cashew) all fit the bill to different degrees in different situations. If I make my own veggie "milk" it usually tastes something like whatever I made it from, but stale and with a cloying chalky mouth-feel. Commercially available veggie milks often taste bad, but not nearly as bad as anything I've made in my blender. There are a few reasons why people might prefer oat milk over the alternatives. * Nut milks are more expensive, Cashew being the most milk-like but also the most expensive. * Rice milk tastes like water and has very little appeal. * Some people claim to be sensitive to soy and others are convinced that it causes gynecomastia (more likely it's the hops in your beer). * Nut and soy milks curdle in acidic coffee and tea. This can be a problem in cooking too; I use both "milk" and lemon juice in my vegan scalloped potatoes. I don't know if this is the case with oat milk or not. In my estimation, oat milk sits at the sweet spot on the milkiness-cost curve between cashew milk and rice milk. It's about as milky as almond milk while being cheaper. Like other vile liquids that people habituate themselves to (coffee), the taste for oat milk can be acquired. It may even be the case that 100 years from now, people will swill oat milk like wine and grate it according to the grassiness of its bouquet.