When Elmhurst Dairy closed its plant in Queens in 2016, the company had been selling milk in New York City for nearly a century. But the dairy–which started with a small farm in the Elmhurst neighborhood and grew to the massive bottling plant, becoming one of the largest dairy manufacturers on the East Coast–could no longer make the economics work. Milk sales were falling, competition was getting harder.
The company’s owner, in his eighties, decided to pivot: In 2017, it started making plant-based milks, and today it makes none at all from cows. In January, it released the first packaged peanut milk on the market. It also sells “milked” almonds, rice, oats, walnuts, hazelnuts, and cashews.
On the site of a processing and packaging facility in Elma, New York, owned by the dairy’s sister company, Steuben Foods, the dairy built a new facility for processing nuts, seeds, and grains. The plant uses a process that mechanically separates raw almonds or peanuts or grains of rice into all of the nutritional components–carbohydrates, protein, fiber, oils, micronutrients–and then reassembles them into a creamy, milk-like liquid.
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