Plant-Based Milk May Be Healthier, But Is It Fresh?

Milk is getting a makeover. A food that has been squeezed out of our domesticated mammals for 6,000[i] years is being judged as immoral (inhumane treatment of animals), unhealthy (animal fat) or otherwise incompatible with our being (lactose intolerance). This may have put the dairy industry into a tailspin (production of 2% and skim milk has declined over the last 10 years) and given dairy cows bleak job prospects, but it has also given at least one startup an opportunity.

Numilk, a startup in Westchester County, about 50 miles north of New York City, creates plant-based milk concentrate, puts it in pouches and hopes that, one day, you will be dispensing plant-based milk in your home with one of its machines.

All sorts of plants are being called on to make milk. First may have been soybeans, but soybeans have been displaced by almonds, coconuts and oats as sources of plant-based milk, followed by cashews, hazelnuts, rice, bananas, and perhaps most surprisingly, hemp. This year’s entry was potato milk. It’s enough to make one wonder: what plant can’t be turned into milk?

Tired of paying more for plant-based milk than cow’s milk and a $1 more for almond milk in our chai lattes, we called up Numilk to lend our support—and to get the details of the company’s plan to take up what remains of our kitchen counterspace after buying Instant Pots and air fryers. Happy to talk to us was William Suh, first engineer and director of engineering at Numilk, who was in the company’s manufacturing facility in Raleigh, N.C.

Got Plant-based Milk?

We have to ask, what’s wrong with buying the plant-based milk from the store? That would seem easy enough and there certainly is a lot of it available.

So many things are wrong with that plant-based milk from the store, says Suh.

You may think the store milk substitute is healthy and sustainable, but it’s neither, he says. Read the ingredients. There’s a lot more than the plant in there.

And it’s not fresh, says Suh. This is a point he will make often. Fourteen times. “Fresh” is a key selling point of Numilk.

“The milk from our machines is produced on the spot,” he says. “The taste is amazing. So fresh.”

Chasing Keurig

Numilk hopes to do with plant-based milk what Keurig did for coffee: change America’s drinking habits.

America’s coffee drinking habits have undergone considerable changes. Colonial consumption of coffee predates the Boston Tea Party. Citizens of New Orleans adapted to chicory for coffee during the Civil War blockades. Cheap coffee probably got America through the Great Depression. For the next 50 years, most Americans were content to have Folger’s drip coffee in the office—except when someone else drank the last cup. Starbucks was to prove that Americans would go out for a cup of coffee—and pay far more for it. That changed in 1992 when Keurig’s little coffee containers arrived in the office and made fresh brewed coffee one cup at a time.

“It’s like a Keurig,” says Suh of Numilk’s upcoming plant-based milk dispenser. “There were a lot of coffee makers out there, but they made it successful. It became convenient to have a fresh coffee. Same way we’re going to make it convenient to have plant-based milk.”

“Home is the ultimate market, right? Millions of people. It’s like a Keurig. There were a lot of coffee makers out there, but they made it successful because it became convenient to have fresh coffee. We’re the same way. We’re going to make it convenient with a product that is so fresh and they can drink their fresh plant-based milk at home.

Plant-based Milk Is Better for You, Right?

Plant-based milk may not be as perfectly healthy as consumers think, says Suh. At least not theirs.

“They put gums, binders and emulsifiers in it to make it look like milk,” says Suh.

How does Numilk make it?

We take fresh ingredients and grind them up real fine. The plants have their own natural oils, so we get this paste like peanut butter. Sometimes we add Himalayan salt, organic sunflower oil—all organic. It depends on the product. Because of a natural oil, like peanut butter, it protects itself from the environment, like honey. Then we put it in a pouch. You don’t have to refrigerate it. It can be at room temperature. It lasts six months to a year in a pouch.

Can plant-based milk be made at home?

People do make plant-based milk at home. They grind the nuts in mixers. They get a lot of particles. It’s not like milk. You have to put it in a water overnight to make it softer. You have to use a cloth to filter out the ground-up material and collect the “milk.” If you really have to make your own milk at home, it takes a whole day. A company came up with a machine to grind the nuts at home and filter the solids and add water, but it’s still a lot of effort.

How is plant-based milk not sustainable?

Big companies got into making plant-based milk. Like Oatly. You can get it in a big bottle or carton. It has to be refrigerated. It has to be shipped everywhere. There’s millions and millions of refrigerated cartons on the way to coffee shops and grocery stores. Refrigeration and transportation take energy. It is totally inefficient to ship plant-based milk around. It’s 90 percent water. Mix the paste with water and ship in in containers puts huge burden to the environment. That has a big carbon footprint. The packaging is one-time use, right? Why not have a reusable bottle?

The Numilk Story

In Shark Tank, a TV show that subjects startups to show biz, Numilk founders got lucky and impressed Mark Cuban, perhaps the most easily impressed shark, enough to secure $2 million in funding.

At the time, the startup was not trying to make money from selling a machine to dispense plant-based milk but was focused on subscriptions for the plant-based milk concentrate.

“We were going with the razor blade model—selling the razor at cost and making money off the razor blade,” says Suh.

But Cuban saw it differently.

“Why not produce a smaller machine and sell [it] to millions of consumers?’ You’ll make income from the sale plus have ongoing revenue selling pouches of the product.

Once funded, the founders had to find a way to make their idea of a Keurig-for-plant-based milk substitute a home appliance. The company had been selling commercial versions of a milk dispenser to coffee shops but, with the expenses, limited production and few direct sales, Numilk was losing money.

For venture capitalists, always keen on finding the next disruption, a hundred coffeeshops with Numilk was not disruptive enough. But a dispenser that was small enough, cheap enough and good looking enough for the homeowner, that would be disruptive.

Making It

With the founders emerging from the Shark Tank with buckets of cash and only a concept, they had to find someone who could actually think through a product design. Enter William Suh, the company’s first engineer. Suh, with a bachelor’s and a master’s in mechanical engineering from Penn State and over 20 years of experience in product design.

“I set up shop in a 10 ft by 10 ft space with a wooden table in the back of a gym,” says Suh.

There was lots to be done before the concept that was sold to venture capitalists could be shipped to customers. There was the eventual shape, which if it were to appeal to consumers, had to be professionally designed.

While the Numilk dispenser’s basic shape was created with Onshape, its aesthetic appeal was left to an unnamed design firm and software. Manufacturing in mass will require a manufacturer under contract, though Suh is vague on who and where.

“We can make hundreds and maybe thousands of machines here, but we’re looking at millions,” says Suh. “We are working with a pretty big appliance maker. They have manufacturing plants all over the place—Mexico, Asia, the U.S….

Suh is adamant that, despite farming the design to external firms, his design team is in complete control.

“How the pouches go, whether it’s front loading, top loading, side loading, how it sounds, how it’s gripped … that’s us driving the design.”

Why Onshape?

Suh’s 20 years of design experience includes a familiarity with traditional design software, such as SOLIDWORKS, NX and Creo. What made him choose to use Onshape?

“Interesting story there,” says Suh. “Engineers like me have worked with the well-known CAD programs. But if you look at the software development and the tools our team uses, like GitHub and Bitbucket, which have flexibility, allow remote work, let you be anywhere and still access your file … we wanted all those conveniences with our CAD system, too. As a startup, we needed a very efficient yet capable CAD system that allowed collaboration from anywhere, anytime, synchronously and asynchronously. How do you do that? You have to do it through the cloud. Onshape is the only full cloud CAD program.”

How Much?

The consumer version is due in Q4 2022 and will be priced at $249. Single-use pouches, of various origin/flavors, (almond, oat/chocolate, cashew and pistachio) will sell for $4.80.

The “pro” version, which is meant for coffee shops and restaurants, will be available in Q3 2023 and will sell for $699.

You pour water into the bottle, add a pouch (available only from Numilk) and press a button. Pouches sell for as much as $6 for an individual pouch of pistachio concentrate to $3.20 for any of the other types. Pouches will be sent in packs of 6 on a subscription plan.