No Whey Protein Price Increase

March 16^th 2011

Many of you who buy protein supplements will have had a shock while doing your supplement shopping in recent weeks - a big increase in  prices!  As an example, Optimum Nutrition 100% Whey which previously had an RRP of £39.99 has shot up to £47.99, Sci Mentor Premium Whey RRP £47.99 to £53.99 - meaning typically the online price has gone from £31.99 to £38.39  - a massive 20% increase on Optimum Whey protein.

So why ?  fundamentally there is a huge shortage of whey protein worldwide due to a number of factors.

Firstly, dont forget that the bodybuilding  & sports supplement markets is very small compared to the babyfood market - which is the number 1 consumer of whey protein worldwide.  What percentage of the world population consumes whey protein supplements? At most 10% perhaps and thats being considerate, its probably more like 6 or less.  What relative amount of the population take milk formula as a baby? Well virtually all of us when we’re that age. So really the protein supplement market is dwarfed by the babyfood market, which pushes it well down the pecking order for whey protein.

So thats old news and nothing has changed there, but in recent times the demands on the whey protein industry have grown significantly.  Previously not big users of whey, China are now becoming more westernised in their diet and are buying up huge supplies of whey protein. Similar buying patterns are occurring with the Middle East and Asia.  Add to this a shortage of supply  in one of the biggest whey producing countries, Australia, meaning decreased whey protein output and you have a real bottle-neck situation.  Increased demand meets decreased availability.  To sum it all up, constantly rising fuel costs mean its more expensive than ever to import raw materials like whey also - so the end result is that there is less whey to around and its now massively more expensive for supplement manufacturers to buy and use in their products.

What all this means to you, the consumer, is compulsory increased purchase prices.  And the bad news is they may not be done yet.  There’s word that more increases could be on the way, except 99nutrition.co.uk have capped their whey protein prices for now, so if you see a good bargain find or deal now, then stock up for the future.

This huge jump in price has caught many sports nutrition manufacturers off guard. The reason for these big price increases is being driven by more than just a slight uptick in the worldwide demand for whey protein. A couple of the big guns in the soft drink manufacturing market have decided to expand their product range offerings and have bought up the majority of the whey protein supply around the world. Coca cola came out with a new product for the Chinese and Asian market that contains whey protein concentrate and they have pretty much emptied the supply of whey protein concentrate within the United States of America. Not a big deal to most companies because of the high fat content in whey concentrate. However, taking this amount of whey protein isolate out of the US market, means there is much less raw material available to manufacture whey protein isolate. To make matters even worse Gatorade, owned by another huge drinks manufacturer Pepsi Cola came out with a new product called Gatorade G3 that is a post recovery after exercise fruit flavoured drink with a small amount of hydrolyzed whey protein inside. Pepsi's purchase alone is rumored to be 550,000,000 pounds; yes, that is 510 million pounds! No one is sure just how much whey protein Coke purchased for their Chinese drink but it is rumored to be as much or more than what was purchased by Pepsi.

For people that choose their protein based on taste, this probably seems like a great move. For those that know how to read a nutritional label, and require an 80% or more based protein powder, this product  is a waste of good protein and is probably another big factor in driving up whey protein prices.