A content analysis of news coverage about plant-based milk

Plant-based milk has provided more options to consumers who are looking for an alternative to dairy milk. The rise in sales of plant-based milk has grown over recent years while dairy milk has continued to decline. To gather more insight into what is being discussed in news coverage about plant-based milk, a quantitative content analysis was conducted on 250 articles published from 2011 to 2020. These articles were coded for word count, location of publication, frame, and article type. The seven frames used to describe plant-based milk were Environment, Animal Welfare, Health, Economics, Labeling, Taste, and Trend. There was an increasing trend line for article numbers with the most articles published in 2019. Most articles were 500 – 999 words and were either Feature or News articles. This could indicate that readers are gaining more information and perspectives about plant-based milk from longer format articles. Another important finding from the study is the use of Trend frame (29.6% of the articles) followed by Taste (19.6%) then Health (16.4%). The Trend frame is related to the growing popularity of plant-based milk. Many Taste articles were written in the form of recipes, which gives inspiration to the reader to use plant-based milk while cooking or baking. The use of the Health frame focused on nutritional information and support of using plant-based milk as an alternative for lactose intolerance or milk allergy. Overall, this study indicated that a majority of plant-based milk news coverage focuses on discussing popularity, consumption, and innovation about plant-based milk through medium length articles.