Philippine Fresh Milk & Plant-Based Alternatives Price Trends

Methodology

To track real-time retail prices of liquid milk and milk alternatives in the Philippines, a data pipeline ingests daily listings from major online grocery retailers (e.g., SM Supermarket, Waltermart). Because stock-keeping units (SKUs) appear in a wide variety of pack sizes (e.g. 180 ml single packs, 250 ml × 6s, 1 L cartons, multi-liter bundles), all prices are normalized to a per-liter basis. The pipeline extracts the volume in liters from the SKU string and computes daily average and median prices per liter, enabling apples-to-apples comparisons across brands, stores, and dates.

To ensure relevance and consistency, the dataset is filtered to SKUs explicitly labeled as fresh milk, sterilized milk, flavored milk drinks, and plant-based alternatives (e.g. oat, soy, almond, coconut), while excluding evaporated milk, condensed milk, goat milk, whipped cream, powdered milk, and other non-liquid products. Each day’s snapshot aggregates normalized prices across available markets and products, producing a time series of average price per liter and median price per liter for the date.

As with any retail scraping, day-to-day variation can occur due to SKU availability. If a specific SKU is unavailable on a given day, the system records the next available matching product. While this may introduce some variability, it reflects the actual consumer-facing prices at the time of access, yielding a responsive, near-real-time indicator of how milk prices move across platforms.

Based on the latest snapshot (as of September 28), the dataset notably includes a wide mix of local and international brands, such as Alaska, Magnolia, Selecta, Nestlé, Cowhead, Jolly Cow, Milk Magic, Chuckie, Bear Brand, Anchor, Arla, Devondale, Emborg, Carmen’s Best, Vitamilk, Vitasoy, Soyfresh, Oatside, Oatly, Silk, Blue Diamond Almond Breeze, So Good, and President. This coverage reflects the diversity of both cow’s milk and plant-based alternatives currently available in Philippine retail markets.

ℹ️ Prices are updated daily from the latest retailer listings, so the time series reflects real-time movements across the milk market.