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Vitasoy trailed only Coca-Cola
A Hong Kong start
The company began in the 1940s, when Hong Kong was filled with wartime refugees. A businessman had been inspired by a talk from an American nutrition expert, who described soybeans as the milk cow of China, and he launched a bottled soy milk company to help feed them.
Spreading worldwide
After the war, soy milk took off as a normal drink you could buy in the supermarket, like a soft drink. Hong Kong became the world's soy milk hotspot in the middle of the 20th century, and Vitasoy's operations moved into Southeast Asia and then more globally.
In the 1970s and 1980s, soy milk sales picked up throughout Asia, and Vitasoy started to be sold in Europe and Australia. It reached the US too, where it caught on with the hippies. Outside China, soy milk became tied up with counterculture and environmentalist movements.
Why did soy milk fit Asia so well?
Many East Asian adults lose most of their ability to digest lactose after childhood, because the enzyme lactase declines with age. Reviews in the medical literature put lactase non-persistence at well over half of adults across East Asia, and far higher in some groups. Soy milk was already a traditional drink in China, Japan, and Korea, so a bottled version fit an existing taste. USDA nutrient data list mature soybeans at roughly 36 percent protein by weight.
Why did hippies take to soy?
Counterculture communes in the 1970s treated soy as cheap, meat-free protein. Frances Moore Lappé's 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet argued that plant protein could feed more people per acre than meat. The Farm, a Tennessee commune founded in 1971, ran its own soy dairy and published a vegetarian cookbook built around soybeans.
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