Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Just figured I'd put this out here. Both Alpro and Oatly has confirmed that their fresh milks are the same as their long lasting shelves versions. The cartons just contain some air, which means that they have worse shelf life and have an expiration date about one month after the production. This results in that they have to be keept refrigerated all the way from the factory and in the stores (causing needless energy waste, and have to be discarded earlier, causing more waste.
So reach for the long lasting ones on the shelves instead of the ones in the refrigerators.

they're not heat treated? I thought that was the point of it

I'd always suspected that they were identical.

Soy milk has to be heated when it's made, so I don't see how heat treating it again would make any difference.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that makes them bad for the environment. Maybe just worse for the environment than the asceptic packages. I don't really know much about packaging the two, but maybe there are positive aspects to packing the refrigerator cartons vs the shelf stable boxes.

Joshua, i think the OP is saying they are all heat treated, but then packed differedntly.

hmm, I'm just going from products I'm familiar with (as different brands may have different practices), but Australian Vitasoy seems to have a difference between the refrigerated and the shelved version.

http://www.soy.com.au/i-sometimes-drink ... -right-soy

"You'll find all Vitasoy Soy Milky Fresh varieties next to regular fresh milk in your local supermarket, and the UHT varieties in the long-life milk aisle of your supermarket."

I read that as implying the refrigerated one isn't heat treated.. though it doesn't explicitly say that it's not. otherwise, they're identical products. I'm not sure what Alpro and Oatly necessarily mean by 'identical' though..

(not that I'm sure of any nutritional difference, but subjectively I think the refrigerated product tastes better)

The ingredients are not the same in shelf-stable and fridge-version Alpro. I've not seen chilled Oatly so can't speak for that one.

They don't do a long life light unsweetened though.

Looks like I've jumped the gun on this one, I based it on a blog entry from a swedish freegan site and only checked the ingredients list on the swedish site, and here the ingredients are the same on the shelf and fridge versions. Strange that they are using different formulas in Sweden than the UK. Oh well, my bad, guess it's only the fridge unsweetend version that's the bad guy in the UK.

Annoying that I can't edit my first post anymore. :/

I thought they must be different because I don't like the "fresh" (doesn't it have quite a long shelf life, too?) but I do like the long life stuff. That's science.

Sure they do. http://www.alpro.com/uk/soya-plain. I've seen it at Waitrose. There's a Provamel version at some H&B's too.