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Not new.
Never was.
People have been turning plants into milk for thousands of years, on every continent that grows them. This is how it travelled from ancient kitchens to yours.
From our kitchens to our culture ♡
Rooted in tradition
The word horchata traces back through Valencia to a tiger-nut drink brought to Spain from North Africa over a thousand years ago.
Medieval European cooks used almond milk constantly — it appears throughout The Forme of Cury, England's oldest known cookbook (c. 1390).
Oat milk as we know it was invented in the 1990s by food scientist Rickard Öste at Lund University, Sweden — born from lactose-intolerance research.
Five thousand years,
one simple idea.
Plants + water + a little patience = milk. Every culture found its own way there.
Southeast Asia & the Pacific
Austronesian voyagers carried the coconut across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Squeezed from grated flesh, coconut milk became the backbone of curries, stews and sweets from Indonesia to Madagascar — and still is.
North Africa → al-Andalus
Horchata de chufa — creamy, sweet tiger-nut milk — travelled from North Africa into Spain, where Valencia made it its own. A thousand years on, it's still poured cold on hot afternoons.
The Middle East & medieval Europe
Almond milk stars in al-Baghdadi's 1226 Baghdad cookbook, then sweeps through Europe's medieval kitchens — prized because it kept without refrigeration and could be used on fasting days.
China
Soy milk (doujiang) appears in Chinese records by the 14th century, with legends reaching back much further. Freshly made, warm, sweet or savoury — it's still breakfast for hundreds of millions.
Paris → Hong Kong
Li Yu-ying opens the first soy dairy near Paris; by 1940 Hong Kong has Vitasoy. Plant milk becomes an everyday bottled staple across Asia long before Western supermarkets catch up.
Sweden
Researching lactose intolerance at Lund University, Rickard Öste invents modern oat milk — patented in 1994. Within a generation it's in coffee shops on every continent.
Everywhere
Oat, soy, almond, rice, coconut, cashew, hemp, pea and more — plant milk is a global, everyday choice. Not a trend: a continuation.
Sources: Smithsonian Magazine · ProVeg International · The Forme of Cury (c. 1390) · Lund University / Öste patent record.
Est. 2017 ♡
Meet the founder,
Robbie Lockie
World Plant Milk Day began in 2017 as a simple idea from designer and campaigner Robbie Lockie: the world's oldest everyday drink deserved a day of its own. What started as a single post has grown into a global campaign, marked every 22 August by people, brands and organisations around the world.
Robbie co-founded Plant Based News and today leads the Freedom Food Alliance, the non-profit behind foodfacts.org — and still believes the gentlest way to change the world is one glass at a time.