Fonterra Cooperative Group is confident the complexity of cow milk will always trump plant-based alternatives, which the Prime Minister’s chief science adviser Peter Gluckman sees as posing an “existential threat” to the country’s economic fortunes.
Gluckman threw down the gauntlet in a keynote speech to the annual NZBIO conference in Wellington yesterday, saying there was a growing consumer appetite around the world for synthetic alternatives to meat and milk, including in the all-important Asian market, with plant-based foods now crossing the taste and texture threshold and offering a much smaller environmental impact than food derived from pastoral farming.
