Lactose-free milk presents an opportunity to boost dairy consumption and coffee shop visits with coffee drinkers

For many coffee drinkers, choosing milk for their coffee shop order often involves navigating a growing list of choices, each carrying different expectations around taste, digestibility, cost, and more. A new study in the Journal of Dairy Science provides a closer examination of how consumers make these decisions, investigating what drives the choice between dairy milk and plant-based milk alternatives in coffee, as well as how the availability of lactose-free dairy milk influences those preferences. The results reveal that the coffee shop market has a potentially underserved group of consumers who might prefer lactose-free milk in their drink orders—and would visit coffee shops more if it were available.