How One Dairy Stock Became a Cash Cow

bloomberg.com

42 points·phantom_oracle··4 comments

From their corporate powerpoint presentation[0]:

• The manufacture and sale of a2™ brand milk is protected by a comprehensive suite of global intellectual property (IP)

• Collectively this IP provides significant barriers, both legal and commercial, to third party production of any dairy product claiming to contain the protein content of a2™ brand milk

• This suite comprise registered patents, trade marks either registered or under application, proprietary processes and know-how

Fortunately, their main business model seems to be FUD, and the patents on that have expired.

[0] https://www.thea2milkcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/...

Good to know. So, to summarize the article, "We've found a way to sell milk for more than double the price at no substantial increase in production costs,* and we're prepared to smother any competition in shady lawsuits. Give us some investment money and we'll cut you in!"

*"The point of difference is that a2 Milk products are sourced from dairy cows that produce only the A2 type of beta-casein protein, whereas most dairy contains both A2 and A1." There's no extra processing involved; they've just got different cows.

The company brings up research that says 25% of people that drink A1 milk feel discomfort, yet they don't have a number for their own a2 milk, just anecdotes. An experiment comparing the discomfort of a1 vs. A2 milk would be very cheap to run and potentially very valuable to the company. So I'd assume they've done that test and the fact they're not reporting positive results means the experiments don't show any benefit to A2 milk.

History of A2 milk, and a bit of discussion as to what little science there is behind the difference in A1 protein inclusive milk and A2 only milk.

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