Tetra Pak showcases ‘CustoMILKzation’ concept at ProFood Tech to help reimagine milk category

Mintel projected that milk will continue to decline to $15.9bn in dollar sales in 2020, marking an 11% decline during the 2015 and 2020 period.

“The biggest challenge in our industry is how to add value to milk because basically milk is always the same,”​ Pedro Goncalves, marketing director for Tetra Pak Americas processing systems division, told DairyReporter.

“Milk cannot be white the same way it was before. It has to come in many different forms.”​

The video takes a user through a sequence of options starting with selecting a consumer (toddlers, children, pregnant women, seniors, body builders, and patients) each with a set of unique needs and likes when it comes to taste, packaging, and ingredients.

Once the user learns a consumer’s profile, the video suggests packaging and then processing options to help meet those consumers' needs, whether it be added protein content or shelf stability. In the case of a pregnant woman, the company suggests the Tetra Pak Evero aseptic carton bottle because of its convenient carton bottle shape and its ability to contain ambient white milk with enrichment such as vitamins, minerals, and omega.

In terms of processing, the video walks the user through the filtration process that Tetra Pak offers, because it can concentrate the nutrient profile by four times the amount to incorporate more nutritional content.

Making the product shelf stable as well as low lactose are also important for a pregnant female consumer, and those product attributes can be achieved through Tetra Pak's aseptic process and dosing technology, Goncalves explained.

Milk: the original clean label product?​

According to Goncalves, milk can easily align itself with the clean label trend.

“The advantage of milk is that very rarely do you get a bottle of milk and see any other ingredient besides milk,” ​Goncalves said.

Additionally, the processing systems Tetra Pak utilizes for milk products do not involve any additives and instead focus on separation and concentration of the fluid milk.

The CustoMILKzation video concept is already being used by the company with some of its customers, Goncalves said. 

"It [milk] doesn’t need to be the same every time and that’s important for the industry to understand,"​ he added.