Impact of Increasing Demand for Dairy Alternative Beverages on Dairy Farmer Welfare in the United States

Production and consumption of dairy alternative beverages in the United States has been on the rise as per capita consumption of fluid milk continues to fall. Almond milk and soymilk are the fastest growing categories in the U.S. dairy alternative marketplace. Using household level purchase data from 2011 Nielsen Homescan panel and tobit econometric procedure, the conditional and unconditional own-price, cross-price and income elasticities for soymilk and almond milk were estimated. Income, age, employment status, education level, race, ethnicity, region and presence of children are significant drivers affecting the demand for dairy alternative beverages, such as almond milk and soy milk.We use the estimates from the tobit econometric procedure to predict how changes in demographic profiles, prices and income will likely affect demand for the aforementioned dairy and dairy alternative products, and how these changes in retail demand will affect the blend price, production and producer surplus of U.S. dairy farmers subject to the federal milk marketing order system. To model the farm-side effects we follow Balagtas and Sumner (2001) and use estimates of elasticities of supply for milk from the literature