Is Potato Milk Set To Dominate Coffee Shop Menus?

Potato milk is the latest plant-based milk to enter the market, intending to challenge oat milk’s dominance and capitalize on the £400 million per year industry.

Waitrose claims that Veg of Lund’s DUG potato milk is off to a solid start after one month on the shelves, with sales likely to grow as more people discover the potato’s power.

“The launch of DUG in our stores has started well and sales are in line with some of our more established plant-based drink dairy alternatives” according to Alice Shrubsall, a buyer at Waitrose & Partners.

“We look forward to working closely with Veg of Lund to inspire and educate our customers about the new alternatives to animal milk that are available in the UK. Our customers love to shop alternatives in Waitrose and we look forward to seeing growing demand for DUG” Shrubsall added.

Potato protein

Professor Eva Tornberg of Lund University in Sweden invented DUG potato milk. DUG is owned by Veg of Lund, a scientific food innovation firm that develops innovative plant-based foods based on Lund University’s research.

“Compared to other vegetables, potatoes are not usually seen as a good dietary source of proteins, as they only contain around 1-1.5 percent protein. However, potato proteins do have an excellent amino acid composition full of essential amino acids, as well as a high biological value (BV), which indicates how well proteins can be absorbed in the body” according to Tornberg.

Climate footprint

DUG states that potato milk has a 75% lower carbon footprint than dairy milk, that producing potatoes uses land twice as efficiently as growing oats, and growing potatoes requires 56 times less water than growing almonds.

Despite its availability only being in Sweden and the UK so far, DUG has a lucrative space on the shelves of 220 of the 330 UK Waitrose stores. Their availability in Waitrose comes just a few months after the deal was finalized in October 2021.

Rapid growth

DUG is expected to rise rapidly in 2022, according to Veg of Lund. “We have high hopes of reaching new and important customer categories through the launch with Waitrose. Despite corona restrictions, we managed to reach out widely in the UK market, and we have customers in several categories, most recently ready meal producers” said Graham Stonadge, Veg of Lund’s UK sales director.

“With greater opportunities to travel and meet consumers and arrange in-store tastings, 2022 should be the year of the potato and the year of DUG’s breakthrough,” Stonadge said.

“Waitrose has ordered the first shipments and we are excited about their customers’ reception, said Emma Källqvist, interim CEO and CFO of Veg of Lund.

“We are very happy to be part of their trend report, it has created extra interest in DUG from both traditional and social media,” Källqvist said.

Potato milk to dominate?

In October, 2021, Waitrose predicted that potato milk would “dominate coffee shop menus in the coming months.”

Though potato milk has yet to make an appearance in large quantities in UK coffee shops, it is becoming more popular and is now available online from Ocado, Amazon, The Vegan Kind, and Navesu, but exclusively in-store at Waitrose.