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

The Benefits of Waking Up Naturally and How To Make It Happen

Are you one of those people who presses snooze for an hour every morning before you’re able to stumble out of bed? Maybe you set your alarm for 7 a.m. and don’t end up actually dragging yourself to the kitchen for your first cup of coffee until 8 a.m.

Even if you’re not hitting snooze, you might also be one of those people who goes to bed at a reasonable hour every night and gets a solid eight hours of sleep, yet you still don’t feel ready to get out of the bed in the morning. Instead of feeling refreshed, you might feel like you’re barely able to put your feet on the floor, despite the fact that you logically know you got plenty of sleep.

One reason you might not be getting the best sleep you can, or you have difficulty waking up in the morning? It could be because you’re using an alarm clock.

You’re probably wondering if not using an alarm clock is even an option, after all, how would you ever get up without it?

For many people, they’ve discovered it’s better for them to learn to wake up naturally, based on their bodies rhythms, rather than struggling and repeatedly hitting snooze.

To begin, the following are some health and lifestyle advantages to being someone who wakes up naturally.

• You can get into a more restful, deep sleep when you’re not always staring at the alarm clock or feeling anxiety as to when it’s going to start going off.


• Your body is designed to wake up in a particular state of sleep, and that’s not during REM, which is the fifth stage. Instead, your body is programmed to perform optimally when you wake up during the light sleep stages, which are usually stages one and two. An alarm clock doesn’t differentiate between light and deep sleep, so you might be waking up when it’s harder for your body to start functioning, which can be why you’re so groggy even if you had eight solid hours of sleep the night before.


• If you are awoken during deep sleep, rather than naturally, it can impact everything from short-term memory to cognitive ability according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

So what are the steps you should take to get a better night’s sleep and over time train yourself to wake up in a more gentle, healthy and natural way?

Know How Much Sleep You Need

One of the first things to do before you ever start trying to wake up with an alarm clock is to get an understanding of how much sleep your body needs. Most people require between seven and nine hours, but this can vary.

Most people are only getting around six hours of sleep a night, and that’s a big part of many of the health problems we face.

To find out what you need, try to give yourself some time on vacation or during a weekend to sleep as much as your body wants. Wake up completely naturally and count about how long you slept. That will give you a good baseline, and you can then start adjusting your bedtime accordingly.

Create a Bedtime Routine

Waking up naturally is all about retraining your body to work the way it’s supposed to, and that includes having a bedtime routine.

Once you know the optimal time for you to go to bed, create a plan for how you’ll fall asleep more quickly and comfortably at that time each night. Maybe it’s a little stretching or certain music you listen to. Whatever it is, it needs to be part of what you do each and every night.

Use a Programmable Thermostat

Is there anything smart home technology can’t do, including making it easier for you to wake up naturally?

If you have a programmable thermostat, consider setting it to start gradually warming up in your house around the time you need to wake up. The reason our bodies like to fall asleep when it’s cooler is because that indicates it’s evening and time to sleep.

Then, as it starts to warm, our bodies begin to sense the daytime is starting, therefore making it more natural for us to get out of bed.

Make Use of Light

If you’re someone who sleeps in a room with heavy curtains, you might consider leaving them cracked so you can see the natural morning light as the sun starts to rise.

Another choice, if leaving your curtains cracked would like street or car lights in during the night, is to use a wake-up light.

Wake up lights can be placed beside your bed, and they’re designed to help your body follow its natural circadian rhythm, which can be off balance from stress and other triggers common in our daily lives. When you’re exposed to light in the morning that’s similar to natural light, it tells your body to start waking up, and it can also support your hormones and balance your melatonin.

Once you’ve got all the above in place, it will take time to get your routine where you need it to be, so be patient. When you’re first working on developing more natural sleep patterns, you can set a backup alarm, but if you stick with your routine you should not only be able to ditch the alarm, but also feel better about waking up.

The Benefits of Waking Up Naturally and How To Make It Happen