To the marketers trying to reboot milk as a sports drink for Generation Z, Yvonne Zapata seemed like the perfect ambassador. An exuberant 24-year-old marathoner from Brooklyn, she describes herself as a proud Latina runner. Her nickname is Miss Outside.
The Milk Processor Education Program signed her to its 26.2 project, an ambitious effort to provide training, gear, advice and other support to every woman who runs a marathon in the United States this year. In March, Ms. Zapatas face lit up a giant Times Square billboard. She starred in her own video. Her portrait is one of several anchoring the Gonna Need Milk website.
There is only one problem: Ms. Zapata would rather drink oat milk.
Dairy milk is good, she explained in an interview, but I feel like realistically its unhealthy.
Ms. Zapata is part of the Not Milk generation, teenagers and young adults who grew up ordering milk alternatives at coffee shops and toting water bottles everywhere. Turned off by the no-fat and low-fat milks served at school, worried about climate change and steeped in the increasing skepticism toward the dairy industry on social media, many of them have never embraced milk. Last year, members of Generation Z bought 20 percent less milk than the national average, according to the consumer market research company Circana.
Nobody drinks regular milk on purpose nowadays, said Masani Bailey, 30, who created a nostalgic deep dive into the celebrity-driven Got Milk? campaign from the 1990s and early 2000s for her TikTok account, @cultureunfiltered.
The dairy industry isnt banking on nostalgia to save the day. It has embarked on a full-frontal marketing assault intended to do what the Got Milk? mustaches on celebrities like Taylor Swift and Dennis Rodman did for previous generations.
We have to reclaim milks mojo, said Yin Woon Rani, the chief executive of the Milk Processor Education Program, a marketing and education arm of the dairy industry based in Washington, D.C.
The industry is also making a play for gamers. Milk processors declared milk the official performance beverage at last years TwitchCon gaming convention in San Diego. Dairy Management Inc., a trade organization, hired the gaming superstars Preston Arsement and Jimmy Donaldson (known to his 139 million YouTube subscribers as Mr. Beast) to introduce seven new cows to Minecraft.