It’s strange to admit, but as more and more consumers react negatively to the lack of nutrition and marketing honesty in plant-based and lab-based beverages, news of their falling sales, struggling stock prices and consumer skepticism has become almost … boring.
But being boring is one thing. Being Bored is another level entirely. Let’s explain.
Two years ago, when “lab-based” milk seemed to be promising some more of the same mislabeling craziness that plant-based dairy imposters have been foisting on consumers for decades, an over-hyped beverage called “Bored Cow” entered the marketplace.
Promising “animal-free dairy milk,” (which, per FDA standards of identity, is impossible), Bored Cow played the same trick as other purported lab-based milk imitators — it fermented one dairy protein (out of hundreds of milk’s total chemical components), added a bunch of other stuff to it, and decided to market it as milk, complete with spurious sustainability claims and promises to “fix our food system,” etc.
NMPF complained to the FDA, and, as has been customary with FDA for the past several decades when it comes to dairy terms, very little happened. But another place where little seems to be happening is … Bored Cow’s sales. Once the hype died down, did Bored Cow just … wander away?
A look at the company website, tryboredcow.com, returns a message saying “Sorry, this store is unavailable.” Same thing happens to the website of one of its two corporate parents, the venture-capital-established Tomorrow Farms. Bored Cow’s Instagram page was last updated last August.
Perfect Day, the other entity from which Bored Cow was spawned, at least still has an active web presence. The company is active enough, in fact, to get sued by the Organic Consumers Association for peddling Bored Cow as milk when it’s actually, as alleged in the lawsuit, about 87% fungus, among other things. (You can see why they’d prefer to associate with dairy, with limited fungus demand among American beverage consumers.) According to an article detailing the suit, Bored Cow has become a bit of a distraction for Perfect Day, which in 2023 pivoted to building business-to-business relationships with large consumer products companies and didn’t want to focus on brands.
Multiple requests for comment from Perfect Day were not returned. Bored Cow doesn’t seem to have any contact information.
To be sure, Bored Cow still seems to exist. Target and Walmart are selling it, and UberEats says it can deliver you some in an hour if you’d like. But if this is the lab-based revolution, it’s a bit underwhelming. Sales of real milk are up, dairy investment is booming, and the return to milk (and the turning away from alternatives) is genuine. Proving yet again that reports of the death of dairy a few years ago were greatly exaggerated. Now it seems like it’s the one-time wave of the future that’s on life support.
An interesting thought. But it’s also one that’s become so obvious that’s it’s getting a little … you know.
