At a convention in 2019, Laura Shenkar buttonholed Greg Steltenpohl—the founding father of Odwalla and then-CEO of Califia Farms—to supply the juice and alt-milk pioneer a couple of sustainability suggestions.
“I used to be like, ‘There are a whole lot of issues it’s good to do to get Califia to be actually environmentally delicate,’” recollects Shenkar, an environmental enterprise strategist on the time, laughing now on the flex. “And he stated, ‘Sure, that’s true. This firm can’t do what you’re describing. You’d want to start out an organization from the bottom up.’” It was a gargantuan process, he warned—one that will require designing the enterprise at each step with a crew that “thinks in another way,” not the standard company CPG varieties.
Viewing that as a problem, Shenkar launched PKN, a pecan milk model, two years later in an try to faucet into the choice milk market. Califia and others had been principally centered on oats and almonds. Almonds are a notoriously thirsty nut, with the very best water footprint of all main California crops. Shenkar had develop into fixated on pecans, as an alternative.
Pecans are nutritious, full of nutritional vitamins A, B, and E, omega-3s, and spectacular quantities of manganese, zinc, and copper. They boast the very best antioxidant content material of any tree nut. They’re wind-pollinated, in order that they don’t depend on bees trucked throughout the nation like almonds do. And so they’re native to america—America’s solely main indigenous tree nut, rising naturally in locations like Georgia, Texas, and New Mexico, the place they’ve thrived while not having ecological intervention.
Pecans on the bottom after harvest at Pearson Farm, Fort Valley, Georgia. [Photo: Robert Holmes/Getty Images]
They’re additionally drought-tolerant, one thing Shenkar was primed to understand after having spent years fascinated with water preservation. Within the early 2000s, she based Artemis Water Technique, a consulting agency that helped governments and firms resembling Intel, IBM, Walmart, and Bain & Firm implement superior water-management applied sciences. She designed the pilot that helped Walmart reduce water use by 30% at 2,000 shops and coauthored a paper that influenced California’s drought response.
Later, the Nature Conservancy’s impression funding arm, NatureVest, employed her to check a drought-prone stretch of the Texas Colorado River exterior Austin. She concluded that one main downside was alfalfa—a high-water-use crop grown for animal feed that’s develop into a bane of the complete Southwest—and that the answer was to plant native species as a replacement. “They’re additive reasonably than depletive of the surroundings,” she says. “You don’t should import water from 200 miles away. You utilize the water that’s falling from the sky.”
That very stretch of the Colorado River can be residence to San Saba, often called the pecan capital of the world. However Shenkar seen that native farmers had been leaving the pecan enterprise. The market, they stated, was fragmented and troublesome. Whereas their greatest nut items—USDA “Fancy”-grade halves—fetched larger costs than different nuts, the darker, nutritionally an identical “Alternative” items had few consumers and infrequently bought offered for animal feed at a loss. What if, she puzzled, somebody used these items to make milk?
“The concept was to upcycle pecans to create a brand new income stream for farmers, to fund their transition into regenerative and natural manufacturing,” she says. She knew it might take capital and know-how. However to her, it was clear: “Pecans, and never alfalfa, are the long run for a minimum of that a part of Texas.”
Tree shaker shaking pecan tree to free nuts for harvest, Tifton, Georgia. [Photo: Edwin Remsberg / VWPics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images]
Pecan milk vs. almond, soy, and oat milk
Right this moment, plant-based options usually declare extra grocery store shelf area than conventional dairy. Trade forecasts recommend the market continues to be heating up. At present valued at $20 billion—bigger than telehealth or pizza supply—it’s predicted to double globally by 2030, reaching greater than $40 billion.
Nonetheless, because the class evolves, it’s not almond, soy, and oat which are posting robust development. The legacy options are actually joined by milks made out of each conceivable nut, seed, grain, and bean. There are actually barley, potato, corn, and water-lentil milks. A model calling itself MILKish sells half-gallons of watermelon seed milk for $10. Oatly’s traders have backed Quiny, a quinoa milk.
But simply because a plant might be milked doesn’t imply it needs to be. Almond milk nonetheless accounts for greater than half of all class gross sales, based on the Plant Based mostly Meals Affiliation and Good Meals Institute’s 2024 market overview, which is predicated on SPINS information. Almond milk advantages from having a light taste and a well-documented well being halo, thanks partially to prolific analysis funded by the Almond Board of California. However California’s almonds require a median of three.2 gallons of whole water per nut, based on one incessantly cited 2019 examine. And the state’s groundwater provides—notably in heavy almond-producing areas like Joaquin and Sacramento counties—are worryingly overdrawn. These two counties alone produce roughly 80% of the world’s almonds.
If the plant-milk market does double by 2030, California almond growers gained’t be capable to double their output to maintain tempo. If something, manufacturing is slipping: Almond acreage fell by 40,000 final yr, a 3% drop and the third consecutive yr of decline.
Soy milk, in the meantime, could also be reasonably priced and excessive in protein. However soybeans are greater than overplanted; the huge monocultures during which they’re grown contribute to deforestation and hasten biodiversity loss. Oat milk is beloved for its creamy texture, however that texture usually comes courtesy of canola or different vegetable seed oils—typically in portions similar to what you’d get in a small order of fries. Cow’s milk, in fact, produces the very best greenhouse gasoline emissions of all, and more and more comes from dairies modeled on industrial factories.
After which there are pecans: nutritious, sustainable, and native to america.
The nut was a dietary staple for Native People residing within the “Pecan Belt” area spanning from Georgia to New Mexico and down into Mexico. Within the sixteenth century, the Algonquians had been getting ready a creamy pecan liquid known as powcohicora—probably America’s very first plant-based milk! Colonists rapidly adopted the observe.
By the 18th century, George Washington was rising pecan bushes at Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson was so enamored that he demanded James Madison ship him boxfuls in Europe “as recent as attainable, packed in sand.” By 1920, U.S. manufacturing had topped two million kilos. Right this moment, the nation produces practically 300 million kilos, greater than four-fifths of the world’s provide. This nonetheless pales as compared even to different nuts: America’s pecan crop is valued at roughly $500 million yearly. Final yr, California produced nearly three billion kilos of almonds value over $4 billion, or eight occasions extra. But Shenkar believes that pecan milk might seize 20–30% of the alt milk market by 2030.
Chris Harrell, CEO of Southern Roots—a $150 million grower-owned pecan cooperative—could be happy. He explains that pecan economics are a bit, effectively, nutty. “Pecans are costly as a result of they style higher, and if you happen to’re a well being nut they examine all of the packing containers,” he says. “However you gained’t see a whole lot of funding going into pecans,” as a result of the margins are a lot thinner than on almonds, and even walnuts. “I sit on 4 totally different business boards,” Harrell provides, “and I spend an excellent portion of every single day discussing how we are able to generate extra demand so we’re not promoting the ‘Alternative’ items at a loss, and we are able to deliver down the value level for shoppers.”
[Photo: Pkn]
Reaching the grocery chains—and throughout the ideological divide
PKN sources its pecans from San Saba, the place farmers harvest from bushes stated to be greater than 200 years outdated. The corporate at the moment presents six merchandise, from a fundamental, four-ingredient milk containing simply pecans, water, vanilla extract, and salt, to sweetened choices like chocolate, a number of totally different creamers, and a model for baristas. They’re offered on-line (via PKN’s web site, Amazon, and Walmart) and at about 500 shops throughout 31 states, together with Albertsons, Sprouts, Erewhon, and Central Market. A 32-ounce carton prices round $6, a greenback greater than Oatly.
PKN has solely two opponents. One, a Georgia-based model known as Treenhouse Naturals, makes canned pecan drinks that not too long ago earned a spot in Backyard & Gun’s annual “Made within the South” awards. The opposite, Pecana, launched in 2023 and has begun infiltrating grocery chains together with Entire Meals and H-E-B—it may well at the moment be present in practically 300 shops. Pecana additionally sources from San Saba, Texas, and is owned by the Chase household, heirs to the Mack Power Company fortune in New Mexico.
That the highest two manufacturers are run by such totally different folks—Shenkar, a self-described “tree hugger” who engages with retailers like VegNews and Inexperienced Queen, and a household that made billions within the Permian Basin oilfields—reveals that pecan milk has a refreshingly broad attraction that’s lacking from different plant-based options.
Prefer it or not, meals selections have develop into political. Our milk preferences possibly most of all: Conservatives have lengthy mocked city progressives’ supposed love of sipping not simply lattes, however soy lattes. MAHA’s current rise, in the meantime, has impressed liberals to declare uncooked milk—one thing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. simply took photographs of on the White Home—the popular beverage of science deniers.
Pecan milk may simply sidestep the tradition wars fully. The sharpest divide over this product appears to be about pronunciation: Many Southerners (and apparently Martha Stewart) go together with puh-CAWN. Northerners lean towards pee-CAN, as evidenced by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan’s well-known When Harry Met Sally scene. The actually deranged say PEE-CAWN.
No matter will get folks to purchase into sustainability is okay with Shenkar. “We are able to tackle a whole lot of issues with pecan milk if it tastes ok,” she says. She’s been excited to find that, with pecans, patriotism and environmentalism might be sides of the identical coin. “There’s a provenance factor right here,” she notes, “which is immediately tied to the environmental impression.”
Mature pecans on the orchard flooring which have simply been shaken from the bushes through the harvesting course of/close to Corning, Tehama County, Northern California, USA. [Photo: Kathy Coatney/Design Pics Editorial/Universal Images Group/Getty Images]
Promoting the “supernut”
Now it’s as much as the business—and firms like PKN—to get the phrase out. Matthew Bailey, a Georgia-based pecan government who publishes the Pecan Report, says pecans as soon as “conjured photos of vacation pies and conventional Southern treats. However the pecan business is working to alter that picture.”
Final August, eight years after the American Pecan Council shaped, Snickers rereleased a beforehand limited-edition, Texas-only pecan bar, this time nationwide. Southern Roots’s Harrell says Dave & Buster’s is about to debut a pecan-encrusted rooster dish. The pecan council, in the meantime, has since launched a nationwide shopper marketing campaign beneath the banner “American Pecans, the Authentic Supernut,” modeled on profitable business promotion slogans like “Beef, It’s What’s for Dinner” and “Pork, the Different White Meat.”
Pecan milk’s profile can be rising. It’s an excellent time to be within the not-almond, not-oat, not-soy milk enterprise: All three misplaced floor final yr, with gross sales down 7.4%, 1.8%, and three.5% respectively, based on NielsenIQ. The lactose-free market continues to develop anyway. Greater than a 3rd of People say that dairy provides them digestive hassle. But plant-based milk’s market penetration hovers round 17%, and 6 in 10 People say they don’t like the way it tastes. PKN’s retailer rely, fittingly, retains climbing: Its merchandise debuted on Goal’s milk aisle in June.
“There’s a whole lot of stuff we’re doing with our advertising and marketing {dollars},” Harrell says. “However pecan milk was one of many first.” He provides: “Laura’s been very instrumental in main that cost.”
Shenkar is now trying to set even larger sustainability targets for PKN, in search of methods to shrink the bodily distance concerned in manufacturing and distributing the merchandise. She believes that will additional deepen pecan milk’s connection to put. “We’re a methods off, however I’d wish to make an Arkansan pecan milk—does Arkansan pecan milk style totally different than Texan pecan milk?” she asks. “Wouldn’t you wish to know?”
