Open-source benchmarking of dairy and dairy-free products
- 1Stanford University
Abstract
Dairy-free products offer opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of food. However, they must reproduce the diverse sensory and functional properties of conventional dairy, from foam stabilization in a latte to acid-gel structure in yogurt and melt--stretch behavior in mozzarella. Yet, large-scale, open-source sensory benchmarks across dairy product categories remain scarce. Here we show that the sensory gap between dairy and dairy-free products varies substantially across ten categories: barista milk, butter, cheddar, cream cheese, creamer, ice cream, fluid milk, mozzarella, sour cream, and Greek-style yogurt. We analyze the NECTAR Taste of the Industry 2026 dataset, which includes 1,437 respondents, 3,220 overall-liking ratings, and 79,027 recorded survey responses, including 35,762 product-linked responses. Leading dairy-free beverages, barista milk (+0.17), fluid milk (+0.02), and creamer (−0.06), closely approach their dairy benchmarks in overall liking on a seven-point scale. In contrast, mozzarella shows the largest deficit (−1.46), followed by Greek-style yogurt (−0.68) and butter (−0.54). All three deficits remain statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Across categories, descriptive penalty analysis identifies off-flavor (1.85 points), stale or cardboard notes (1.81 points), and artificial or chemical notes (1.80 points) as the sensory attributes associated with the largest reductions in overall liking. Together, these results establish the first open sensory benchmark for dairy and dairy-free products, identify beverage categories that approach conventional dairy in overall liking, and reveal the sensory attributes and product categories with the greatest opportunities for future innovation.
Related
- B-vitamin concentrations in raw milk from dairy cows receiving diets with different forages and grassland contents and the resulting fermented milk products (cheese and yogurt)
- The impact of replacing dairy products with plant-based dairy alternatives on iodine and other micronutrients: a modelling study and evaluation of policy options to support population intake
- Evaluation of spatiotemporal patterns and uncertainty of multi-source remote sensing GPP products in the Southwest karst region of China
- ct-validation: an open framework for benchmarking target-indication evidence against clinical trial outcomes
- Benchmarking immunoinformatic repertoire assemblies from bulk RNA-seq and PCR-based V(D)J sequencing using PCR-free SMRT RNA sequencing
BibTeX
@misc{koosis2026opensource,
title = {{Open-source benchmarking of dairy and dairy-free products}},
author = {A. O. Koosis and C. Cotto and E. Kuhl},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.64898/2026.08.14.744929},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.14.744929v2},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Open-source benchmarking of dairy and dairy-free products
AU - A. O. Koosis
AU - C. Cotto
AU - E. Kuhl
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/14
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.08.14.744929
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.14.744929v2
AB - Dairy-free products offer opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of food. However, they must reproduce the diverse sensory and functional properties of conventional dairy, from foam stabilization in a latte to acid-gel structure in yogurt and melt--stretch behavior in mozzarella. Yet, large-scale, open-source sensory benchmarks across dairy product categories remain scarce. Here we show that the sensory gap between dairy and dairy-free products varies substantially across ten categories: barista milk, butter, cheddar, cream cheese, creamer, ice cream, fluid milk, mozzarella, sour cream, and Greek-style yogurt. We analyze the NECTAR Taste of the Industry 2026 dataset, which includes 1,437 respondents, 3,220 overall-liking ratings, and 79,027 recorded survey responses, including 35,762 product-linked responses. Leading dairy-free beverages, barista milk (+0.17), fluid milk (+0.02), and creamer (−0.06), closely approach their dairy benchmarks in overall liking on a seven-point scale. In contrast, mozzarella shows the largest deficit (−1.46), followed by Greek-style yogurt (−0.68) and butter (−0.54). All three deficits remain statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Across categories, descriptive penalty analysis identifies off-flavor (1.85 points), stale or cardboard notes (1.81 points), and artificial or chemical notes (1.80 points) as the sensory attributes associated with the largest reductions in overall liking. Together, these results establish the first open sensory benchmark for dairy and dairy-free products, identify beverage categories that approach conventional dairy in overall liking, and reveal the sensory attributes and product categories with the greatest opportunities for future innovation.
ER -