Starbucks Wades Into Oat Milk, Where Indie Coffee Bars Are Already Swimming

Independent coffee shops have been on the oat milk bandwagon for a while now, offering the milk alternative along with other non-dairy varieties.

However, it’s taken coffee giant Starbucks some time to catch up.

Initially, Starbucks began offering oat milk as an alternative at its upscale Reserve outlets, like the giant one it just opened on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.

Now, Starbucks is wading in a little deeper. It’s going to make oat milk available at selected stores in the Midwest.

It said Tuesday that oat milk will join its alternative milk lineup at 1,300 locations in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin.

Starbucks is peddling a new Oat Milk Honey Latte, while customers at those locations also can opt for oat milk in their other beverage. It joins a milk alternative lineup that already includes soy, coconut, and almond milks.

2020 is likely to be a big year for oat milk, as I predicted in this story. Brooklyn ice cream make Van Leeuwen recently rolled out a line of oat milk ice creams, while big yogurt brand Chobani has introduced oat-based yogurts.

Starbucks isn’t diving head first into oat milk across the U.S. just yet, even though it began offering oat milk in Europe in 2018, and has offered soy milk since 2004.

That’s most likely for a couple of reasons. One, producers have had some trouble in the past keeping up with demand.

Two, it needs to see where oat milk will be most popular — such as suburbs or college towns — and roll out training once baristas get some oat milk experience under their aprons.

Along with the oat milk honey latte, Starbucks introduced two other milk-alternative drinks: an almond milk honey flat white, and a coconut milk latte.

The marketing of those drinks comes in the wake of Veganuary, the month-long effort by a British-based charity to promote vegan eating.

CNN reported that sales of oat milk jumped 222 percent from April 2018 to April 2019, according to the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that promotes plant-based businesses.

That’s a fraction of the total market for alternative milks, which is about $2 billion. In that period, oat milk sales totaled $15 million, compared with $1.2 billion for almond milk.

By contrast, it’s been a difficult time for traditional dairy producers. This week, the Borden Dairy Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, while Dean Foods, the country’s biggest milk producer, sought bankruptcy protection in November.

Milk production fell by about 13 percent during the past decade, as thousands of family farms went out of business, or stopped producing milk.