Alternative milks are steadily making headway in the traditionally cow-based dairy industry, though most are made from boring, old plants.
But what if you could get dairy from a splashier source? Enter: fish milk.
We’ll give you a minute…
… to finish picturing how you might milk a fish — Maybe with a tiny bucket? — but that’s not what’s happening here. (Unfortunately.)
The Berikan Protein Initiative, an Indonesian nonprofit, is turning fish into “milk” through a chemical process called hydrolysis, per The Wall Street Journal.
- Fresh fish are deboned, dried, and “reduced to a white protein-rich powder.”
- The powder is combined with strawberry or chocolate flavoring, plus sugar.
- Add water, and you get something that supposedly “tastes like normal milk.”
The organization believes fish milk could be a $4.5B industry.
But not everyone…
… is hooked on fish milk. The consensus is that the chocolate variation is too fishy.
Budi Gunadi Sadikin, Indonesia’s health minister, told WSJ he’d prefer to raise cows or import milk from nearby Australia.
“There are many, many, many options to do before we are milking the fish,” Sadikin said.
Here in America…
… market research group NielsenIQ says overall milk sales are declining due to rising costs, with alternative milks declining faster since they’re already more expensive.
That said:
- People are specifically buying lactose-free dairy milk despite the higher cost.
- Despite the dip for other alt milks, this suggests consumers will continue buying alt milks in general, per NielsenIQ.
So, maybe fish milk has a chance?
The next time someone offers you a glass of thick, hearty, strawberry-flavored fish milk, remember that drinking cow milk also must’ve seemed weird at first.
