The protein boom: What does it mean for food producers?
Protein-rich products are moving from niche to mainstream
Protein has moved beyond sports nutrition and into everyday food and beverage categories. High-protein dairy products, in particular, have emerged as a strong area of product innovation and growth. At the same time, established demand for plant-based alternatives means consumers are sourcing protein from an increasingly diverse range of products.
For food producers, this creates opportunities for growth, but responding to demand can require new production capacity, additional processing steps or entirely new production lines. The challenge is knowing what to invest in. As demand for protein-rich products grows, producers need to consider both today's opportunities and tomorrow's production needs. Consumer preferences and product portfolios continue to evolve, while investments in production assets are made for the long term.
Recent market data illustrates the shift: 27% of new yogurt launches carry a high-protein or source-of-protein claim, while more than one in five yogurt consumers identify protein as an attractive product claim. The trend is particularly relevant in Europe. 1
When consumer trends become investment decisions
The growth of protein-rich products is increasingly visible beyond supermarket shelves. Across the dairy industry, rising demand is translating into investment decisions.
New processing capacity is being added, existing plants are being expanded, and production systems are being optimized to increase capacity and make better use of available resources. Producers are also looking beyond traditional product categories and exploring how whey streams and other by-products can become valuable ingredients rather than secondary outputs.
This development is particularly evident in products such as protein-enriched yogurts, quark, drinks and functional nutrition products. As volumes grow, the challenge is no longer only product development. Producers also need production systems capable of delivering these products efficiently, consistently and at scale.
This turns a consumer trend into an engineering challenge.
Building the right capacity for long-term production
Food production assets have long lifetimes, while consumer preferences can change quickly. A product category growing strongly today may look different five or ten years from now. Recipes change, new products enter the market, and requirements around sustainability, cost and resource efficiency continue to develop.
For producers considering investments today, this creates a balancing act: how can growing demand be addressed without designing production around a single snapshot of the market?
The answer is not simply to make production more flexible. Dairy plants are typically designed for continuous, high-utilization operation, with significant investments in process technologies tailored to specific products and production steps. Once installed, these assets are expected to operate reliably and efficiently for many years.
The challenge is therefore to build the right degree of adaptability around these specialized processes. When investing in new capacity, producers need to consider not only today's product and volume requirements, but also how production flows, product mix and processing needs may develop over the lifetime of the plant.
Making more from available resources
At the same time, sustainability and resource efficiency are becoming increasingly connected to investment decisions.
For dairy producers, this can mean looking beyond additional capacity and considering how more value can be created from the raw materials already entering the plant. Maximizing the value extracted from milk, reducing product losses and improving the use of side streams can all contribute to a more efficient production system.
Whey is one example. Rather than treating it primarily as a secondary output, processing and separation technologies can enable valuable proteins and other components to be recovered for use as ingredients in food and nutrition products.
The same principle applies to water and energy. Understanding where resources are used, where losses occur and where processes can be optimized can help producers increase production value without increasing resource consumption at the same rate.
Resource efficiency is therefore not a separate sustainability consideration. It is increasingly part of the overall production and investment strategy.
Investing for a market that will continue to change
For producers, the investment challenge is not simply to add capacity, but to add the right kind of capacity.
Investments need to address today's growth opportunities while considering how product mix, processing requirements and resource availability may evolve over the lifetime of the asset.
In a sector where production assets may operate for decades while consumer preferences can shift much faster, adaptability can become an important part of investment resilience. Future-ready production capability therefore complements the traditional priorities of capacity, efficiency and product quality.
From protein boom to future-ready production
At AFRY, we work with food and dairy producers across the production lifecycle, from early studies and process design to engineering, automation and optimization. This gives us a view across individual process steps and the wider production system.
As demand for protein-rich foods continues to shape investment decisions, the opportunity is bigger than simply producing more. It is about creating production systems that can deliver more value from available resources while retaining the ability to adapt as the market evolves.
Footnotes
- 1. Innova Market Insights, Global Yogurt Trends 2025 - https://www.innovamarketinsights.com/trends/global-yogurt-trends-2025/ a↩
