What a massive blind taste test of vegan milk, cheese, and ice cream found — explained in one chart

Over the last two decades, the availability of plant-based foods has exploded.

You can get a meat-free patty in your Burger King Whopper if that’s your thing, buy realistic “chicken” nuggets at your local grocery store, or order marbled plant-based steak from food startups. But one animal-free food category has truly escaped containment from the vegan menu: plant-based milk.

Milk made from soybeans, oats, almonds — even corn, bananas, peas, or potatoes — or any other plant-based source now accounts for around 15 percent of fluid milk sales in the US. For comparison, sales of plant-based meat make up around just 1 percent of the American meat market.

A new, massive blind taste test might help explain plant-based milk’s notable rise: A lot of people just think it tastes good — in some cases, almost as good, or just as good, as cow’s milk. (Read on to see which products rose to the top.) Other dairy-free products, like plant-based mozzarella and yogurt? A lot less so, the experiment found. The same goes for most plant-based meats, according to a similar blind taste test I wrote about when it was released last year.

Knowing which of these products people like — and dislike — and more importantly, how to make them better, is important, because dairy has a significant environmental footprint. Global dairy production spews about the same amount of climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere as global air travel, and cows’ waste is a major source of water pollution. In dairy farming, cows are also subjected to a number of cruel practices, and the industry comes with threats to human workers, as well. A more sustainable and humane future, then, depends on making all dairy alternatives go mainstream, not just your favorite cow-free milk.

Late last year, a nonprofit called NECTAR — which researches alternative proteins like plant-based meat and dairy — recruited 2,183 people in San Francisco and New York City to participate in the largest ever blind taste test of dairy-free foods. Six percent of participants were vegetarian, 3 percent were pescatarian, and the rest considered themselves either “flexitarians” or omnivores.

Without knowing which version of a product they were tasting, participants tried a number of some of the top-selling 98 plant-based dairy products across 10 categories tested in the experiment, which included ice cream, barista-style milk, yogurt, cream cheese, and regular drinking milk — alongside one animal-based “benchmark” per category for comparison. Each item was prepared as it would be in a real-world setting: cream cheese was smeared on bagels, mozzarella was served on pizzas, creamers were used in coffee, and so on.

Participants then rated each product on a seven-point scale — from “dislike very much” to “like very much” — and provided feedback on flavor, texture, and appearance.

It might not come as a huge surprise to hear that most participants tended to like conventional dairy products more than plant-based versions. Taking the combined ratings of all products tested, on average, 65 percent of participant ratings on conventional dairy products were “like very much” or “like,” while only 35 percent of ratings of the plant-based dairy products reached those levels.

The results also highlighted a wide gap in quality among plant-based products. The top dairy-free creamer, sour cream, barista milk, and regular plant-based milk rated at similar levels as the dairy versions. But the averages tended to lag far behind.

This finding confirms something I’ve previously written about: There are some very tasty plant-based meat and milk products out there — and a whole lot of not-so-tasty ones. And the latter reality might cause some people to write off whole categories of meat and dairy alternatives after buying and disliking one or two disappointing products.

In a head-to-head comparison, only one plant-based product out of the 98 tested achieved “taste parity” with its dairy counterpart: Califia Farms’ Oat Barista Blend, which is primarily used in coffee drinks and is meant to replicate something like whole milk. It was tested in lattes against whole cow’s milk from Horizon Organic. Participants were split, with 35 percent preferring the oat milk, 35 percent preferring the cow’s milk, and 30 percent having no preference between the two.

Caroline Cotto, the director of NECTAR, told Vox that Califia Farms achieving taste parity “is really exciting — just to show that this is possible…and [that] this category has legs.”

Although only one product achieved this vaunted status of taste parity, several others came close. And in other head to head comparisons, 27 percent of the products had at least half of the participants either rate it better than the animal benchmark or had no preference between the two.

“It met my expectations that dairy is a little bit further ahead of where meat alternatives are,” Cotto said.

But it’s worth noting that plant-based dairy has an inherent leg up. Many people opt for dairy-free products due to allergies or lactose intolerance, which isn’t typically the case with meat. And dairy tends to more often be an ingredient — think milk in coffee, cheese on pizza, sour cream on nachos — rather than the main course, like a steak or sausage. That means how dairy-free products perform on their own matters a bit less than for plant-based meat products.

Perhaps the most important finding, in my view, is that, for each dairy-free product — even some of the most poorly rated ones — a good amount of participants enjoyed them. That suggests the market has a lot more potential to grow, and NECTAR has some ideas on how to make that happen.

Improving products in the worst-performing categories — like plant-based yogurt and mozzarella — should probably be a top priority for the sector. But every category has room for improvement, NECTAR found.

The organization analyzed participants’ feedback on flavor, texture, and appearance for each product and found that off flavors and funky aftertastes were a leading complaint, especially for dairy-free yogurt and sour cream. “Increase richness” was the top request for numerous categories, including ice cream, cream cheese, cheddar, and butter. The group shares its results with the companies involved to potentially inform product improvements.

“Increase stretchiness” was ranked as a common request for mozzarella, a problem that has long vexed the vegan cheese business. In 2021, I asked in a piece for Vox, “Where’s the ‘Impossible Burger’ of cheese?” As far as I’m aware, it still doesn’t exist, though there’s buzz around super-stretchy dairy-free mozzarella from the startup Bettani Farms, which launches in restaurants and cafeterias later this year.

NECTAR also wants to bring the results to food service operations, like restaurants and university and corporate cafeterias where consumers are usually presented with one unbranded option (like a single oat milk carafe), so they know which products are most popular.

But, perhaps, what would be most effective in getting more people to embrace plant-based dairy would be finding ways to lower prices. NECTAR found that, in surveying people, when plant-based milk costs even just 25 percent more than cow’s milk, 43 percent fewer people said they would intend to buy it than if it cost the same. And, in the real world, compared to conventional dairy milk, soy and almond milk cost much more. To be sure, people often act differently when shopping. But it does suggest that consumers are price sensitive when swapping dairy products for dairy-free, and other research has borne this out for some milk alternatives.

It’s worth noting, however, that the low price of cow’s milk is somewhat artificial; the US dairy industry is heavily dependent on government support by way of subsidies, environmental and animal welfare deregulation, and federal nutrition policy that all heavily favor conventional dairy over plant-based varieties.

While NECTAR’s experiment focused on market fundamentals like flavor, texture, and price, there are a number of squishier barriers that stand in the way of widespread plant-based food adoption. Food preferences are shaped not just by our taste buds but also what we ate as children, what our peers like, cultural traditions, and social norms. Addressing those will be just as challenging, if not more so, than improving flavor and price.

Plant-based meat and milk alternatives remain one of the more promising avenues available to address our inhumane and environmentally unsustainable factory farming system, though the sector hasn’t quite taken off in the way many of its boosters predicted a decade ago. But widespread adoption was never likely to happen overnight. Instead, if it does happen, it’ll more likely be a slow, gradual process, with wonky, technical interventions — like food science R&D and blind taste tests — underpinning its success.