I live in a City where half the population is Asian or Jewish. Both categories have a genetic intolerance for the lactose in cows milk. There are a high proportion of Blacks, Latino’s and American Indians who are also lactose intolerant.
The consequence is that many of the people in these categories know about their lactose intolerance and, for the past decade, have found a milk product in their grocery store that has no lactose in the milk. The best known brand is Lactaid. Now Safeway and others have their own house brands of milk. About 10% of the milk I see in my local stores is lactose free.
The Lactaid company and a few others are now making additional dairy products that are lactose free. Lactaid makes six flavors of ice cream, Breyers makes three flavors. Several companies make lactose free yogurt, cottage cheese, cream cheese and sour cream.
So what is my problem? I can rarely find any of the other lactose free products in stores that are selling 10% of their milk lactose free. And when I do find them, they are hard to recognize.
Safeway and other big grocery chains seem to be:
* too big to notice what products sell well unless they are pressured by their wholesalers,
* spend all their time buying other large chains and shuffling management,
* are really not in the grocery business but are in the real estate investment business.
If one of these big grocery chains ever gets into food marketing I would suggest a display or a single refrigerated compartment that has all the lactose free products in one place so their customers can find them.
Half your customers, in some markets, will buy them. The big coffee chains should notice this issue too. People are drinking soy milk in lieu of 'lactose free'.