Coca-Cola to sell milk

Apparently, any beverage will do for Coca-Cola to help it reach its self-set target of doubling its business by 2020. In December, it launched its own brand of milk, which it claims could become so popular that it will “rain money” for the company.

Fairlife, which is the product’s brand name, costs twice as much as regular milk and has 50 percent more protein and 30 percent less sugar.

Sandy Douglas, Coke’s global chief customer officer, was quoted as saying in November 2014 that Fairlife was “a milk that’s premiumised and tastes better and we’ll charge twice as much for it as the milk we’re used to buying”.

He told a conference: “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. But like Simply [Coke’s premium fruit juice line], when you do it well, it rains money later.”

Mr Douglas said Fairlife, which is a joint venture with U.S. dairy farmers, used “a proprietary milk filtering process that allows you to increase protein by 50 percent, take sugar down by 30 percent, and have no lactose.”

Milk sales in the U.S. have dropped 8 percent over the past decade, and half of American adults do not drink milk, according to the trade journal Dairy Today.

Coke has no plans yet to launch the product, which has already been branded “Milka-Cola” on Twitter, outside the United States.