I’ll probably stick to asking for oat milk instead of “porridge water” or whatever the new mandated name will be. To be honest I do think calling it “milk” lets them inflate the price when it is essentially porridge water.
Dairy UK had argued that it was unlawful to use “milk” in a trademark relating to “products that are not mammary secretions”.
I think consumers need to argue that all milk should be accurately labelled as “mammary secretions”
I love dairy milk, especially and exclusively UHT Milk. But fuck the dairy industry so much.
I find this whole “it’s not milk if it’s not dairy” argument really hard to take in good faith.
I’m not an expert at all, but when I’ve heard people talk about these kind of decisions, it sounds like it’s normally meant to come down to consumer benefits.
Who’s gaining here (aside from dairy lobbies)? I don’t think there’s any reasonable argument that UK citizens are confused by the term “oat milk”, and buying it because they were tricked into thinking it was a dairy product.
I know a person who thought that the “plant milks” are flavours of regular milk until it was explained to them. Like chocolate milk.
All people are at least a little stupid. We’re all stupid in our own way. Something that seems obvious to you and I may seem mind-boggling to someone else.
Would have been hilarious if big dairy brought them into the trial as an “expert witness”.
“Yes, that’s right ladies and gentlemen, I am a real life strawman.”
Yeah there are idiots, but what’s the harm? They may be shocked to find there’s 0 dairy, but how does that impact them? The nutrition info is on the label, as is the ingredients.
Tbf especially with “almond milk” I could 100% see that. Honestly it’s more logical than “they squeeze all the juice out of the almonds” (I have no idea the process for making almond milk lmao ykwim), someone seeing it and saying “Almonds huh? Crazy, what flavor will they think of next? I’d have chosen hazelnut” is really not that big of a jump.
Honestly I’m more surprised I didn’t think that, but iirc I was informed about it through a vegan friend before I even saw it in the store.
Law has a concept of the average idiot (cannot remember the real term). When applying confusion as a risk. Honestly milk has been used so much in English. (Coconutsand other things) I think that would fail.
I ANAL though.
Its more likely that oat milk is intentionally selling as a mamory milk alternative. That was made as an argument. But it is clearly a biased response from the court.
RIP coconut milk.
Funny that before oats and soy started gaining in popularity they had no problems with coconut milk.
I like coconut milk as although milk, it makes for great mixers!
And milk of magnesia!
Yeah. And it is clear the court is not being unbiased. Given your comment.
It seems likely that parliment could be convinced to rule on this with enough negativity. No legal restrictions exist on the name. The dairy industry has no trademark or claim of unique use or confusion.
Parliment has the right to rule against this by act. if they agree. IE basically passing a law restricting courts from bias against long used language terminology.
Honestly it would require folks to write to MPs pointing out the stupidity ans bias. But enough may be annoyed by this that such a movement can be formed.
They didn’t? Or it just wasn’t as common to voice it?
Milk of Magnesia has been getting away with it for decades.
And coconut milk. We now have to call that “non-mammary coconut secretion”?
Nut secretions
Hand cream. Shea butter.
Milk of the poppy is ancient as fuck no?
I thought George RR Martin invented the phrase “milk of the poppy” to describe apine/opium in his ASOIAF series. Never crossed my mind that he might have lifted it from a history textbook.
I mean you might be right. However there exists a Ukrainian Christmas dessert called poppy milk that’s just poppy seeds and water.
So I’m gonna give myself this one on a technicality haha
I looked into the high price of plant milks. It’s essentially because the industry is new and still investing in R&D and new factories. The dairy industry has very little innovation now, just court cases.
Don’t forget the dairy industry takes lots of health subsidies in many countries too.
Easy enough, go with “oat mealk”
Gosh that’s good
Call it MlLK where you replace the capital i with a lowercase L
I MADE THIS FOR YOU!
[Miak] (https://youtu.be/a6v9qaGaO_Y)
Oat klim.
And what about the word “milking”? Is it legal to use when you are not talking about mammaries?
This is why I think the soy milk brand Silk is a brilliant product name.
Now we just need a non-dairy whey-fortified milk alternative to call itself Milky Whey
Monsoon ain’t gonna like that! Mind you, the Met Office are eyeing them up, once they get past the class action for trying to own human contact lol
Wait for the courts to rule silk is only “excretions from the salivary glands of worms”.
Oilk?
Oalk.
🐷
That ship has sailed, Milk boys. Consumers call it oat milk and that’s not changing.
I love me some porridge water. Especially a porridge water latte.
You know what, I have zero problem calling it that, own it oatly! :D
Porridge is different. It’s been cooked which crosslinks the starch molecules. Oat milk isn’t porridge water… it’s different down at the molecular level. Believe me, I made this mistake when ‘cooking’ up a batch, sorry, that should have been ‘cocking’
Sadly, they’ll probably call it ‘Nilk’ or something lazy like that
MALK. Fuck, that was a Simpson’s joke and when I was searching for an image I found this: https://www.heb.com/product-detail/malk-original-organic-oat-milk/1954842
I would go with cereal water. It’s what it is, and something it can be used for.
Courts don’t define words, people and dictionaries do. And this was in the telegraph which means it BS anyway. Ignore and don’t click
Laws and consumer protection agencies can and do define words in the context of consumer goods.
I love porridge water.
“thin gruel” just doesn’t have the right ring to it
But it gives you an excuse to say “please, sir, may I have some more”.
Minor Figures oat milk is my favourite. Try some different brands. You’ve been given a bad one… was it cheap?
It just needs a bit of snazzy marketing.
Just call it Ultragruel or Oatfuel and write “PROTEIN” on it in big letters.
Actually, now I think about it, that only covers one section of the market.
You should also release exactly the same product with with different packaging a few times:
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One with an off-brand Mr T character mascot, called “I Pity The Gruel”.
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One called “Bilk : Better than Milk”.
That’s a few shelves of supermarkets covered with selling the same thing. I’m sure you can cover some more with a few like “Barista Supreme: Oat-based Cream”, “Oat Water”, “Oat Juice” and simply “Oat-based Drink”. Maybe even “Oat Blood”, for Goths and “My dad was a gruelmaker” for Keir Starmer fans.
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This is stupid on the surface, BUT “milk” in some jurisdictions is protected with legal standards. This prevents watering down or other issues.
I am not familiar with the UK, so I don’t know if this is applicable.
In the US, “ice cream” is protected and has to meet standards, otherwise it is called a “frozen dairy dessert”.
Additionally, in the US we recently had a massive butter recall from Costco because it did not label “dairy” as an allergen. Common sense indicates butter contains milk, HOWEVER, these allergen labels are the law and the allergens feed into downstream items. IE, if you use the butter to make brownies, then the brownies must be labeled. If you automate this process or whatever, you could miss this, due to it not being labeled correctly.
While oat milk is relatively new, almond milk and soya milk are older than the legal protections the milk industry is trying to use. Almond milk has been almond milk for near enough a thousand years, soya milk is close to twice as old. Basically the word milk hasn’t referred exclusively to mammal milk for as long as the word milk has existed.
Also, tinned coconut milk is actually labelled coconut milk just fine without a problem.
I wonder how many people might be be put off dairy, even if it’s just for a moment before putting it out their mind, if all dairy products were labelled mammary secretions.
I’m not sure (but happy to be corrected) that there is a legal standard definition of what constitutes milk. There was a documentary on Radio 4 a few years ago that asked “What is milk?” and found that - in UK and Europe - it couldn’t be answered (other than it had some cow involvement somewhere). Some pateurised “milks” had barely any actual milk. From what I remember it was the lobbying of the dairy industry that prevented a standard definition.
other than it had some cow involvement somewhere
Nope! Goat milk is common, so is human (though not commonly sold). My answer would be “mammal tit juice” but the UK seems to have summed it up nicely above with “mammary secretions” as well.
Yeah, on the surface, it looks like evil cow farming lobbyists trying to force the competition to use a stupid name.
But on the other hand, without a protected name, what stops corporations from lacing their milk with 20% oat milk and hiding it in the ingredient list to save cost?I’d buy that. If you want to replace 20% of my animal product with plants and can do an ok job I’m down.
As long as it’s labeled properly and you don’t have to do anything crazy, it’s at the very least something I’ll try.
Well, nut and grain milk are much more costly, so I doubt that
not during production
your reasoning behind the law and it’s purpose is spot on, I think.
