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Milky Mist Skyr gives you 10 grams of protein for 93 calories. Their curd gives you the same 10 grams for 190 calories. Double the calories for the same protein.
My first instinct was that you're paying for what's been removed. Milk goes into a factory, carbs and fat come out.
I was wrong. I went through their IPO prospectus and used Claude to check the numbers and the process, then verified it against industry norms and their own product listings.
Skyr is made by fermenting milk and then concentrating it through membrane filtration. Nothing but milk and cultures goes in. No protein powders. Which means that 700 gram pack holds the protein of well over two litres of milk. The curd tub holds one. Why is the premium so small when a pack of skyr needs two and a half times the milk? Because protein is conserved.
Ten grams of protein takes the same milk whether it ends up in curd or skyr. They can afford to give you two litres worth of milk protein in one 700 gram pack because the lactose and fat that don't come home with you don't go to waste either.
Per gram of protein, the two products cost nearly the same. ₹3.8 for curd, ₹4.5 for skyr. An 18 percent premium to halve your calories. That's not a hefty premium if you are watching your calorie intake.
The lactose that's filtered out of your skyr is spray dried and sold in 25 kilo bags as dairy permeate powder. They sell it to bakeries, confectioners, and feed mills, at about ₹100 a kilo.
Their permeate drying plant has been running since 2017, four years before skyr even launched. The "waste" was a business before the product was. They're now building a plant to refine it further, into pharma-grade lactose.
So the same litre of milk gets split by a membrane into two products. You pay ₹496 a kilo for the protein half. A bakery pays ₹105 a kilo for the sugar half. One more thing from the filings. Their new yogurt line costs ₹90 crore. ₹75 crore of that is the filling and packing machinery. The machine that puts yoghurt into small cups costs five times the machine that makes the yoghurt. Small packs are expensive because filling them is expensive.
The takeaways for a consumer:
Dairy protein costs about the same per gram in every format. Pick the format that fits your calorie budget. There is a premium for smaller packs and reducing the carb and fat content. You have to decide if it is worth it for you.
Buy the biggest pack you can finish. You're paying for the packaging line, not the protein.