Welcome to skyr, the Viking ‘superfood’ waking up Britain

One of Iceland’s top dairy experts will arrive in Britain this week to help an adventurous Yorkshire farmer increase production of skyr, a Viking food that was barely known beyond the north Atlantic for a thousand years but is now being marketed as a “superfood”.

Ten years ago skyr – prounced skeer with a trill on the r – barely registered in the world’s yoghurt market. Now, according to global business consultants Future Market Insights, the market for skyr is worth nearly $ 8bn (£6.4bn) a year and growing fast.

The skyr boom first took off in the US and Scandinavia and could sweep into Asia after a recent visit to Japan and China by Icelandic dairy farmers. Skyr first went on sale in British supermarkets in 2015 and is still relatively unknown here – but that could be about to change.

Yorkshireman Sam Moorhouse, 23, the only British farmer making skyr, already has a deal with Booths supermarket, known as “the Waitrose of the north”. He will welcome Icelandic dairy expert Thorarinn Egill Sveinsson to Hesper Farm, near Skipton, on Thursday to help him install new equipment.

“I need to scale up to meet demand,” said Moorhouse, who started production in 2015. “The bank was sceptical about funding at first and nobody had heard of skyr, but it has been very popular. I was looking at diversification two and a half years ago and I read an article about skyr. I flew to Iceland to try it, worked at a skyr producer, met Thorarinn and he has helped me since I started.”

Skyr’s popularity in the UK could also be about to be boosted by Arla, one of the world’s biggest dairy companies, which will advertise skyr on TV in January, the month when yoghurt sales are highest.

The biggest producer of “authentic” skyr, MS Dairies, has also identified the UK as its largest growth market. It is owned by 700 Icelandic farmers and has tried for two years to have the skyr trademark protected, like Parma ham or Stilton cheese. It failed and this has allowed big dairy companies such as Arla and other smaller entrepreneurs to cash in on the boom.

So why has something that has been around for a thousand years taken off at the breakfast table?

Iceland’s tourism boom has helped to spread the word, so has a big push from Starbucks and the fact that skyr is thick enough to be eaten “on the go”. But the main reason is what Arla calls skyr’s “three credentials” – low sugar, no fat, and high protein content.

Although it is marketed as a yoghurt, skyr is technically a soft cheese made from skimmed milk. After the whey has been removed by ultra-filtration it is so thick that a spoon will stand up in it. A culture of lactic acid bacteria is added, and the process from cow to supermarket shelf takes three to four days.

The “skyr is good for you” message is broadcast in Scandinavia by Eidur Gudjohnsen, the footballer who scored more than 70 Premier League goals for Chelsea and Bolton, and won the Champions League with Barcelona. He and his father both played for Iceland, and both have eaten skyr all their life.

Arla started selling skyr in Asda last year, and when it launched last year with an advert filmed in Iceland it irked MS Dairies. Like the skyr sold in the US, Arla’s product was not made in Iceland, and the media in Reykjavik wrote of “skyr wars”.

“We own the recipe, they don’t have our culture, so it’s real skyr v copycats,” said Jon Axel Petersson, head of marketing at MS. “Arla is a Danish-Swedish company that makes its skyr in Germany, and they said that they were located in Iceland.”

Viking cows are smaller than European cows, and produce only 60-70% of their milk yield

Jon Axel Petersson, MS Dairies

But Iceland cannot meet demand. It takes 3.5 litres of milk to make one litre of skyr and there are only about 30,000 milk-producing cows in Iceland. “Viking cows are smaller than European cows, and produce only 60-70% of their milk yield,” said Petersson.“They would not be used in other countries because they cannot compete. But they are protected and have been here for a thousand years.”

There has been talk of importing bigger cows, but it seems unlikely.

MS, which produces under licence in Denmark and Norway with local milk and will have to do the same in Britain, started selling its skyr.is brand in Waitrose earlier this year and has just shifted its two millionth pot. Arla has had a good year in Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Lidl recently joined in with its own brand which, at 49p, is far cheaper than the “authentic” skyr, which sells for £1.25 in Britain and £2.50 in Norway.

UK sales are dwarfed by those in Scandinavia and the US. In Norway and Finland, where the courts allowed MS to protect its skyr by trademark. In Iceland annual consumption is measured in kilos per person.

Iceland’s farmers are making good money – from zero to €70m (£60m) in exports in five years and a 23-fold increase in production. And so are the dairy giants. But not as much as Siggi Hilmarsson, an Icelandic entrepreneur who gave up his job at Deloitte in New York after he started making skyr in his own kitchen.

His mother sent him a recipe from a 1960 women’s magazine she had found at the national library in Reykjavik, and Siggi’s is now the fastest-growing brand in a US yoghurt market worth $ 9bn a year, selling in Starbucks and Whole Foods shops. Hilmarsson had two outlets in 2006 when he started; now he has 25,000.

“After graduating I had a corporate job that I didn’t really like and I started making yogurt as a hobby because I missed eating skyr from home,” said Hilmarsson, who has lived in the US for 14 years. “I asked my mum to find me some recipes.

“I realised there was a market for healthy food with lower sugar content, and especially lower sugar yoghurt. Greek yoghurt is similar in texture but has much more sugar. We have no additives, low sugar, high protein. It’s all clean ingredients.

“When I started I hoped there was a future selling a high-end product that could sustain me and maybe a couple of employees. I thought I could make a living but didn’t foresee this.”

Moorhouse sees Hilmarsson as a role model. “How big will it become? It’s hard to say, but I hope to use all the milk we produce in skyr.”

Welcome to skyr, the Viking ‘superfood’ waking up Britain

Invasion of the Viking infants

Portion of the difficulty is down to our program, with donor recruitment generally carried out on a little scale in British fertility clinics. On common, just a single in each and every twenty males who applies will be ideal to donate. Guys do not only need to have to have large-high quality sperm: they also have to undergo a full variety of screening tests for genetically inherited illnesses and sexually transmitted infections, and their family members health care histories should be assessed. People deemed ideal will need to commit to typical visits to the clinic, generally in the course of the functioning day. It’s frequently less complicated for a clinic to propose their consumers use a Danish donor, in which a professional sperm financial institution has the sources to devote to finding the five per cent who match the bill.

Though some greater fertility clinics right here do have a prepared provide of donors, inter-clinic competition signifies that those who do not have a tendency to suggest an overseas sperm bank. Olivia Montuschi, of the Donor Conception Network, a charity for those affected by donor conception, informed me that individuals are not currently being informed about the clinics that have donors available. “Clinics like to retain their personal sufferers, not share them, and they preserve info about donors at other clinics to themselves,” she says.

In the course of our research for the programme, we spoke to a amount of couples who had used Danish sperm donors, and it was evident that a lack of data about United kingdom donors had at times been an situation.

1 couple had been advised they would encounter a wait of up to ten years for a suitable donor in their area. They couldn’t realize why there was such a prolonged wait, especially when the effect of childlessness is so excellent, explaining that not being capable to have a little one “can really ruin a connection, and can genuinely destroy your life”.

They turned to Denmark for sperm in their aggravation. “It in fact appealed to us a bit a lot more in some respects,” they admit. “No be concerned of [donor offspring] bumping into a sibling, significantly less opportunity of that. We were excited about getting a tiny Viking!” In reality, following several unsuccessful attempts utilizing Danish donor sperm, they employed a Uk donor by means of a private clinic and now have a little boy.

For any person seeking for a donor, one particular of the attractions of Denmark is the broad decision offered. The shortage of donors in the United kingdom implies that there is usually a limited variety, and apart from some simple traits such as height and fat, info about the donors tends to be pretty minimal.

_{Annemette Arndal-Lauritzen, of European Sperm Financial institution}

When Annemette Arndal-Lauritzen, head of the Danish firm European Sperm Financial institution, guides me via the record of donors on their website, the level of detail is outstanding. If you want to know about a donor’s training, his character, health-related history, way of life, hobbies or even see a photograph of him as a little one, it is all there.

She shows me that, at the click of a button, I can pay attention to a donor talking in English about his favourite movies, meals or music. Just about the only things you can’t uncover are a recent photo and the donor’s real name, or contact information, as even these who opt to be “known donors” are anonymous at the time of donation. (Donors to European Sperm Financial institution can elect to be wither anonymous or “known” – allowing their identities to be disclosed to any offspring, when they turn into adults.)

Ahead of I set off for Denmark, fertility specialists I spoke to told me that despite the fact that they had been content that the Danish method was risk-free and robust, there were considerations about whether the donors understood the long-term consequences of “international” sperm donations. The Danish males whose sperm reaches Uk clinics are known donors, and under British law their identities might be released to anyone conceived utilizing their sperm as soon as they attain 18. At a future date, Danish donors could be contacted not just by younger folks from Britain, but by dozens of others from close to the planet who had been born as a end result of their donations.

But Arndal-Lauritzen is adamant that the donors they recruit at European Sperm Financial institution understand the predicament. “When they start currently being donors, they have imagined about this,” she insists. “They do not go into this with their eyes closed.”

John is only to allowed develop 10 households in Britain, but his donations are sent to several other countries which use identified donors. Even though each and every nation may have its own rules about this, there are no global limits on the amount of youngsters from any one particular donor.

At European Sperm Bank, they tell me that the average quantity from any one of their donors is fewer than 25 children, although for some the figure will be greater. John is relaxed about this and says that even if his donations had made a hundred kids, he can’t see what the dilemma would be.

Perhaps it is only when the young children born employing Danish sperm are old adequate to have their own viewpoint about it that we will know the accurate effect of this Viking invasion.

“The New Viking Invasion” presented by Kate Brian and created by Steve Urquhart will be broadcast on BBC Radio four on Friday 27th June at 11am.

Invasion of the Viking infants