Coca-Cola's New Venture: Expensive Milk

With soda sales sagging, Coca-Cola is moving into the dairy business. It plans to offer milk with some big differences to the stuff now on supermarket shelves: For starters, it will cost twice as much. A Coke exec told a conference last week that the company's Fairlife will be "a milk that's premiumized and tastes better and we'll charge twice as much for it as the milk we're used to buying," the Guardian reports. Chief Customer Officer Sandy Douglas said the milk, which is being produced in venture involving 92 family-owned dairies and will launch next month, will contain 50% more protein and 30% less sugar than regular milk. A filtering process will also make it lactose-free.

"We're going to be investing in the milk business for a while to build the brand so it won't rain money in the early couple of years," Douglas said. "But like Simply, when you do it well, it rains money later," he added, referring to the company's strong-selling juice brand. A Fairlife spokesman describes the product—which some have dubbed "Milka-Cola"—as "innovative ultra-filtered milk" that will offer consumers "a dairy option that is sourced from sustainable family farms," reports the Independent. Fairlife is already on sale in Minnesota, where its launch was accompanied by some eye-catching print ads that some found sexy and some found weird, Business Insider reports. (This fall, Coca-Cola pledged to help reduce the number of calories people are consuming through soda.)