Why Pecan Milk Is Suddenly Crushing It
Source: Fast Company, Clint Rainey
Photo: Mark A Paulda/Getty Images, Leonello Calvetti/Science Photo Library/Getty Images, xamtiw/Getty Images
Pecan milk—a newcomer to the the $20 billion alt-milk industry—is sustainable, nutritious, and tasty. It could even help bridge America’s political divide.
At a conference in 2019, Laura Shenkar buttonholed Greg Steltenpohl—the founder of Odwalla and then-CEO of Califia Farms—to offer the juice and alt-milk pioneer a few sustainability tips.
“I was like, ‘There are a lot of things you need to do to get Califia to be truly environmentally sensitive,’” recalls Shenkar, an environmental business strategist at the time, laughing now at the flex. “And he said, ‘Yes, that’s true. This company can’t do what you’re describing. You’d need to start a company from the ground up.’” It was a gargantuan task, he warned—one that would require designing the business at every step with a team that “thinks differently,” not the usual corporate CPG types.
Viewing that as a challenge, Shenkar launched PKN, a pecan milk brand, two years later in an attempt to tap into the alternative milk market. Califia and others had been mostly focused on oats and almonds. Almonds are a notoriously thirsty nut, with the highest water footprint of all major California crops. Shenkar had become fixated on pecans, instead.
Pecans are nutritious, packed with vitamins A, B, and E, omega-3s, and impressive amounts of manganese, zinc, and copper. They boast the highest antioxidant content of any tree nut. They’re wind-pollinated, so they don’t rely on bees trucked across the country like almonds do. And they’re native to the United States—America’s only major indigenous tree nut, growing naturally in places like Georgia, Texas, and New Mexico, where they’ve thrived without needing ecological intervention.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clint Rainey is a Fast Company contributor based in New York who reports on business, often food brands. He has covered the anti-ESG movement, rumors of a Big Meat psyop against plant-based proteins, Chick-fil-A’s quest to walk the narrow path to growth, as well as Starbucks’s pivot from a progressive brand—into one that’s far more Chinese.