The humble spud is set to become the new non-dairy milk champ

Move over soya, nut and oat milk because potato is set to become king in the burgeoning plant milk industry. A Swedish brand Dug went on sale in a British supermarket this week and is said to be deliciously creamy and the perfect foam for a cappuccino.  

It’s difficult to believe that the watery substance one gets from squeezing potato, when making potato rösti for example, a dish that requires the potato to be dry, could be anything close to creamy. The Dug brand adds pea protein and rapeseed oil, which we know as canola, to make up the potato milk and inferred creaminess.

With the sales of plant-based milk booming around the globe, I recall my colleagues’ faces as I put a range of non-dairy alternatives in front of them in a blind tasting last year — and after sipping soya, almond, oat and rice milks, their grimaces and howls of protest said it all. Our palates are still very much aligned to dairy milk, though this appears to be changing, albeit slowly, as the range of non-dairy alternatives continues to grow on our supermarket shelves.

Apart from the move to plant-based lifestyles, the growth of non-dairy milk alternatives, for many, is in an effort to support staving off the environmental effects associated with dairy farming, though the effects of non-dairy alternatives raises many other issues, such as sustainability, and for the local market, many of these products are imported.

The producers of Dug say growing potatoes is way more efficient: it uses far less water than crops such as oats and nuts.

In SA where potato farmers have had a few turbulent years due to climate change and other reasons unique to cultivating the tuber in this part of the world, consumers have experienced steep price increases for potatoes. That said, I’m not sure we’d be happy to trade slap chips for creamy cappuccinos.