The latest faux-milk darling: pecans

The latest faux-milk darling: pecans

The materials from which we can derive milk are seemingly endless: Soy. Almonds, oats, rice, peas. Fish, apparently. But the latest star is the pecan. 

Despite the fact that people are drinking more dairy milk these days, the $21.1B plants milk market is expected to grow to $41B by 2034. After all, ~68% of the world’s population has lactose malabsorption.

And while pecan milk may not be super new, it is having a moment, per Fast Company

A tough nut to crack

While we have, again, milked pretty much everything, not all faux-milks are created equally. 

Some don’t taste anything like milk or come with flavor profiles that don’t work well in cereal or coffee. Some, like rice milk, have a too-thin texture while others can curdle in beverages.

There have also been numerous debates over whether certain milks — and additives to make them sweet or creamier — are good for us. 

Almond milk checks a lot of boxes, but it’s a highly unsustainable crop, especially in drought-prone California, which produces 80%+ of the world’s almonds.

But pecans have several factors in their favor. They’re:

  • Nutrient-packed
  • Drought-tolerant and consume less water to produce than almonds
  • Native to the US, meaning farmers don’t need to alter the environment to grow them 
  • Wind-pollinated, and, unlike almonds, don’t require shipping in bees

Who’s making pecan milk?

PKN founder Laura Shenkar was inspired while studying a drought-prone area of Texas where she found alfalfa crops were sucking up water, but farmers were ignoring the more sustainable pecan because it wasn’t as lucrative.

Pecana, founded third-generation pecan farmer Kortney Chase, sources from its own farms in Texas.

Treehouse Naturals was founded in Georgia by Bess Weyandt and Kate Carter in 2015, who noticed a lack of almond milk with minimal ingredients in their local grocery stores. 

Reviewers tend to enjoy it. Food Network found Pecana’s original flavor “exceptionally creamy” with the same “buttery quality” that makes pecans work in ice cream and pie, and Delish reported that PKN’s unsweetened flavors worked well in coffee and over cereal. 

That all sounds more promising than fish milk