For most of the last decade, the question that shaped dairy strategy was what consumers would buy. Over the next five years the question that will shape it is what regulators, customers and trading partners will permit. This paper sets out the twelve drivers behind that shift, how we classify them, and one of the four futures they produce. Confident View Ahead | Confident Strategy Group | September 2026 In 2022, the dairy chief executives and regulators we worked with asked us two questions. The first was about demand: would plant-based alternatives keep taking share, and would consumers pay for provenance? The second was about technology: what would happen to the industry when milk proteins could be produced by fermentation rather than by a cow? On demand, our view was that dairy would prove more durable than the headlines suggested. Four years on, the evidence supports that view. The strongest demand signal in dairy today is for its proteins, and we set out that evidence below. On technology, the change has been faster than on any other driver in this paper, and it has happened on the farm as well as in the factory. In the factory, fermentation-derived dairy proteins […]