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by troyvit 529 days ago
This is what drives me crazy about oat milk. Oats grow everywhere. Almonds, on the other hand, take a gallon of water per almond to make[1]. Despite this, at my store anyway, almond milk is about $2.89/half gallon while oat milk is at least $4/half gallon. What in our economy makes this feasible?

[1] https://bastyr.edu/about/news/ugly-truth-about-almonds

1 comments

>What in our economy makes this feasible?

What do you mean "feasible"? It's profitable to sell something for more than it costs to make. If the only companies that offer Oat milk for sale price it at $4 a gallon, that's the price you have to pay to get it.

Meanwhile there are laws around the pricing of Milk, and in my neck of the woods that includes a MINIMUM price.

People wave their hands like "the market" is magic. As long as some consumers are willing to pay $4 a gallon for oat milk, companies will not reduce the price, and plenty of people are willing to pay MORE for oat milk than for cow milk.

If you wonder why nobody starts a company that undercuts the $4 oat milk, the simple answer is that the second you are done spending $1 million on a factory to make cheap oat milk, the producers already in the market drop their price and your business fails. This is why Google Fiber for example struggled. There is no technical reason prices are high. There's just no competition because the current producers are so massive and have such giant war chests that they can just kill your brand new competitive business, and soon your business will be dead and they can slowly ratchet up prices again.

There's also the fact that homemade oat milk is trivial to produce, results in a great product, and is cheaper than even that mythical competitive industry would produce.

I mean maybe you're right. Maybe people are like, "Oat milk is so different than almond milk that I am going to pay twice the price." I'm like uhhh it's white, vegan, and I can dunk a cookie in it. I'll buy what's cheaper.