In retrospect, maybe the Pop-Tarts were too little protein. Americans, by and large, are in a state of protein mania. We eat it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and almost any time in between. We like in chips, candy, soda, water. We love protein so much, in fact, that we’ve been eating it all.
Whey-protein price they are increasingand shortages may be imminent. “Demand is improving,” the USDA warned in a recent report, and “the list remains complex.” Some manufacturers have already sold their devices for the whole year. Since January, the wholesale price of food-grade flour powder has risen by more than 50 percent, to the highest level on record. according to commodity pricing experts at DCA Market Intelligence.
Retail prices are also rising: Six months ago, a two-pound jug of Optimum Nutrition’s “sweet strawberry”–flavored whey protein powder. went to about $40 on Amazon; now it is 54.03 $. “We’ve really felt it,” Stephen Zieminski, CEO of supplement company Naked Nutrition, said of the shortage in an email to me (though he noted that his company did not raise prices). “Demand is up and supply is tighter than it’s ever been.”
Historically and currently, most of the protein that has gone into packaged foods and smoothies and those big tubes of protein powder comes from whey. Raw milk is treated with heat, acid, or enzymes to coagulate it into two distinct substances: the curds, which become cheese, and the whey, which was, at least until recently, a byproduct of the cheese-making process.
Almost as long as industrial agriculture has existed, the problem of whey has not been a shortage at all, but the opposite. Farmers did whatever they could to get rid of it as cheaply as possible: feeding it to livestock, spraying it on fields (“although the smell and saltiness were often a problem,” as one food scientist to put it), he threw it into rivers and sewers. For most of our nation’s history, any fish unlucky enough to be born in Wisconsin or Vermont had a good chance of being killed by whey.
Then environmental regulation reduced the disposal of whey, and technological advances made processing whey into powder easier. Beginning in the 1980s, whey was the food industry’s go-to source for supplemental protein: cheap, vegan, effective, and readily available in abundance. Supply and demand were more or less in alignment, for a while.
But it came protein fever. Influencers started bragging about how many grams they gained per day. The government turned the food pyramid upside down, placing protein at the top. People from all walks of life have latched onto protein as a one-size-fits-all supplement, supposedly capable of giving anyone the body they want, as long as they eat enough of it (although the truth is, more difficult) And food manufacturers responded to this new demand with enthusiasm, using America’s new favorite nutrition wherever they could, usually in the form of whey.
Now the infrastructure cannot continue. The North American dairy industry has pushed through nearly a decade of investment in whey processing over the past four or five years, University of Wisconsin at Madison agricultural economist Leonard Polzin told me—but it’s still not enough. “Consumer needs and consumer preferences can change faster than processing capacity,” he said. “We’re in that late stage right now.”
Turning raw cow’s milk into a protein powder, edible and sweet enough that people want it is a very difficult process, requiring space and time and large and expensive machinery. At one point when Polzin and I were talking, I suggested that one of these machines might cost, say, $100,000. Polzin told me – try millions. A full processing plant could cost up to $1 billion to build, he said. “Everything is just a big number.” Even if you were, theoretically, you started raising capital for a milk processing facility every day protein-maxxing first appeared on Reddit—three years ago—it’s unlikely that it’s in use today.
The higher the protein content, the more difficult (and expensive) the processing. Whey protein isolate—the most protein-rich protein available, the kind that makes it possible to fill half a chicken breast with fat in a candy bar—is the most expensive and, until recently, a very small part of the market. The dairy industry is not set up for it. “Processor decisions are long-term decisions,” Polzin said. “It’s very difficult to make capital investments under the hood, based on whatever new consumer preferences are out there.”
Polzin grew up on a dairy farm. He remembers the cottage cheese craze of yesteryear, when a balanced country set its sights on superfoods based on milk that were supposed to make you healthier and thinner and stronger. Fashions to come and go, was his intention. They move fast. Our desires change faster than the systems that satisfy them. North America is currently building approximately $12 billion worth of milk processing capacity. Projections indicate that the current shortage will be short-lived and that the dairy industry will meet demand in the near future. I just wonder what consumers will be demanding then.
