Coca-Cola is entering the dairy market with its own brand of "premiumised" milk, which is twice as expensive as regular milk and contains 50 per cent more protein.
The new brand, called Fairlife but dubbed "Milka-cola" on Twitter, will launch in the US next month, with Coca-Cola chiefs hoping it will "rain money" on the company.
"It's basically the premiumisation of milk," Sandy Douglas, Coke's global chief customer officer, told a Morgan Stanley investment conference last week. The company wants to repeat the success it has had in the US fruit juice market with its premium line Simply.
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"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, when you do it well, it rains money later," said Douglas.
Fairlife, a joint venture with US dairy farmers, is "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 said.
It claims to have no lactose and 30 per cent less sugar than regular milk.
Fairlife says its extra protein comes directly from the milk by filtering it into its five components – water, butterfat, protein, vitamins and minerals, and lactose – and then recombining them in different proportions.
Writing in trade journal Dairy Today, Jim Dickrell says the announcement "could be the start of a milk revolution".
Half of US adults do not drink milk and the industry has been in decline for 40 years, with sales dropping by around eight per cent over the last ten years, he says.
A Fairlife spokeswoman told The Guardian there were no plans to launch the product 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," notes the newspaper.
