Neil Freiman

Now, historically, whey has been cheap

and abundant dairy farms couldn't even give it away.

An executive at the protein bar startup David told Bloomberg that dairy companies used to approach food companies to try to sell them their way.

Now, due to the protein mania, that relationship has been reversed.

Buyers are calling up suppliers to make sure that they have enough way to make their products.

Toby, as most supply crunches go, this one starts on the more industrial end of the value chain, but eventually it could impact consumers.

So what are food companies going to do?

Maybe they have a stockpile of whey, but maybe they are scrambling to find supplies.

Well, one alternative is to find alternatives.

Use different types of protein sources to create your protein pop tarts or your protein popcorn.

One of those alternatives is milk protein concentrate, which is cheaper.

It's a cheaper alternative to whey-based products.

Other companies are trying to go with pea protein, which is maybe something that those alternative meat companies have tried over the past couple of years.

But the problem is when you start putting in new ingredients, and you can just use this in your kitchen home, if you use yogurt instead of sour cream or any sort of substitute, you're changing the taste.

And for these food companies, they need to make a very, very consistent product.

So when you're bringing in a new protein ingredient, it changes the mouthfeel, it changes the flavor, it changes everything.

So

It's really not easy just to substitute something else for whey protein.

So this is a big problem.

My only regret is that we didn't stumble onto this story last week because I did make cheese mozzarella over the weekend.