Coca-Cola enters dairy market with ‘Milka-Cola’

Rupert Neate
26 November 2014
The Guardian
Fairlife will cost twice as much as regular milk, contain 30% less sugar, and ‘make it rain money’ for the soft drinks firm
Coca-Cola is launching its own brand of milk, which it claims could become so popular that it will “rain money” for the company.
Fairlife, which will launch in the US next month, will cost twice as much as regular milk and will have 50% more protein and 30% less sugar.
Sandy Douglas, Coke’s global chief customer officer, said Fairlife was “a milk that’s premiumised and tastes better and we’ll charge twice as much for it as the milk we’re used to buying”.
He told a conference: “We’re going to be investing in the milk business for a while to build the brand, so it won’t rain money in the early couple of years. But like Simply [Coke’s premium fruit juice line], when you do it well, it rains money later.”
Douglas said Fairlife, a joint venture with US dairy farmers, used “a proprietary milk filtering process that allows you to increase protein by 50%, take sugar down by 30%, and have no lactose.”
He made the comments at a Morgan Stanley investment conference last week, but a transcript has only recently been released.
Milk sales in the US are down 8% over the past decade, and half of American adults do not drink milk, according to the trade journal Dairy Today .
A Fairlife spokeswoman said there were no plans to launch the product, which has already been branded “Milka-Cola” on Twitter, outside the US. Coke is still smarting from a failed attempt to sell bottled tap water in the UK under the brand Dasani in 2004.