Coca-Cola Switches Gears With a New Line of Protein-Packed Milk
The once ubiquitous “Got milk?” ads featuring milk-mustached celebrities look tame next to the provocative ads for a new beverage, Fairlife. “Drink what she’s wearing,” proclaim the ads, which show a brunet bombshell wearing a minidress made of dripping dairy.
Coca-Cola is a major investor in Fairlife, a new dairy product that, unlike its soda offerings, is being promoted as an even healthier alternative to the typical milk that finds its way into your morning cereal and coffee. Healthy is sexy, and sex sells—at least that’s what the soda giant is hoping.
With clear links between sugary beverages and obesity, soda sales have been on the decline for the past nine years. With this foray into dairy, the company could get its hands on a far healthier-seeming beverage that could lead to a new sales success. In addition to presenting itself as healthful, Fairlife promotes its use of humanely treated cows and sustainable farms to create vitamin-enhanced milk, which will hit shelves nationally in December, according to Business Insider.
Not only is the new beverage lactose-free, but it also offers 50 percent more calcium and 30 percent less sugar—but consumers will have to pay double the price of a gallon of the traditional stuff.
So just how do they ditch the sugars and lactose and replace it with extra protein and calcium? A video for Fairlife explains the filtration system: Fats, sugars, and proteins are physically different in size, and the filter, designed with those variations in mind, is able to weed out the undesirable elements and save the healthy components. So bid farewell to all those sugar compounds and double up on the calcium and protein—it's "the premiumisation of milk," as Sandy Douglas, Coca-Cola's North American president, said in a recent conference.
Coke executives are hoping this venture will pan out for the long haul. Douglas explained that with enough nurturing, he expects Coke’s investment in dairy to eventually “[rain] money.”
The company is in a bit of a rough patch. Most recently, the soda giant’s suffered disappointing third-quarter sales, and a lawsuit was brought against it for calling sugary Vitamin water a health drink. More broadly, the industry is facing a soda tax in Berkeley Calif., and a proposed label warning on each carbonated can spelling out the health risks associated with every sugary sip.
As healthy as Fairlife purports to be, this endeavor into premium milk is still a risky venture: Sales for fluid milk have continued to decline over the past four decades.
Related stories on TakePart:
• Coke: Artificial Sweeteners Are Awesome
• The Un-Soda Stream: The Machine That Turns Coke Into Water
• Mexico’s Soda Tax Is Working
• Is the Downfall of Soda Imminent?
Original article from TakePart
