Can camel milk make the journey from arid deserts to India’s chic urban patisseries?

Varda Ram has been herding camels since he was five years old. The first thing he and his group of pastoralists do after waking up is check on their animals, ensuring that any thorns in their fur are removed. After the mothers are done feeding their babies, Ram and his group collect milk from the animals and take them out to graze.

Ram is a member of the Raika community, who have been herding camels for centuries. He travels between 10 km and 15 km each day across west Rajasthan with fellow pastoralists and a herd of around 40 camels. It is a way of life that his parents and grandparents followed before him, stemming from the belief that they have been divinely created by the god Shiva to care for the animals.

“From the moment I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was camels,” Ram said. “So I have an attachment to them. We have love for the camel because our fathers and grandfathers have been keeping camels for many centuries.”

But the Raika way of life is becoming rare, as grazing areas have increasingly been fenced off. According to United Nations data, the camel population in India fell to about 200,000 in 2019 from more than 1 million in 1996, an 80% decline. Communities that once reared camels now rely far more on motorised vehicles rather than the animal for transport, and chemical fertilisers rather than its dung to nourish the soil.

In response to the decline in the population and the way of life itself, many younger Raikas are leaving the work in search of more lucrative jobs, Ram said. Three of his children have found other jobs and he fears that his family’s generational legacy will end when he dies.

However, Ram and his fellow pastoralists have been encouraged by a recent initiative by Camel Charisma, a company that has been buying camel milk from them to process and distribute to consumers since 2015.

In October, the company invited several chefs from across India to travel to the Rajasthan town of Sadri for two days, aiming to inspire restaurants and food producers to use camel milk in their dishes and products. Increasing the popularity of camel milk could help reverse the trend of the rapid decline in the animal’s population, the company hopes, and renew the livelihoods of Raika communities.

Supply and demand

Dairy is the largest agricultural commodity in India. In 2022-’23, Indians had 459 grams of milk per capita available every day, above the global average of 322 grams a day.

Despite this, India still faces a shortage of milk. Dairy producers have reported deficits resulting from climate crises and rising fodder costs. This has led to higher milk prices and gaps in the supply chain.

But in Rajasthan’s camel milk market, supply outweighs demand, noted Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, co-founder of Camel Charisma. “There are thousands of litres available in Rajasthan that are not being used,” she said. “There’s a lot of milk that’s out there that somebody just has to invest in to access.”

For now, a small-scale initiative like Camel Charisma can only point to directions for initiatives to use camel milk to meet India’s shortage. The organisation works with around a dozen Raika families and produces around 100 litres of milk a day.

The organisation pasteurises and stores milk at its facility, selling milk, ghee, powder and a variety of cheeses. The organisation collects milk from the pastoralists it partners with, and transports the milk frozen to locations across the country.

The milk is primarily distributed to individual buyers. With the right resources, Köhler-Rollefson said that production could be scaled up to 7,000 litres daily.

One of the main hurdles to implementing such an idea, however, is that camel milk is still a relative unknown. The restaurant industry almost exclusively uses milk from cows and buffaloes, which is the most accessible, the cheapest and the easiest to produce. Consumers tend to be hesitant about new ingredients, said chef Radhika Khandelwal, owner of the restaurant Fig & Maple in south Delhi.

“People don’t like to experiment with things they don’t know,” Khandelwal said. “Every season we introduce new ingredients onto our menu, and you do need to give people a little bit of a push to try it.”

Culinary imagination

Camel milk has a slightly saltier flavour profile than cow milk, and has more of a chalky white colour than cow milk, which has a yellow tint. It has a longer shelf life than cow milk – a 2024 study found that pasteurised camel milk can be preserved for seven days without spoiling. By contrast, bovine milk lasts between 24 hours and 48 hours.

In addition, camel milk has been shown to have greater nutritional benefits than cow milk. A 2021 study found that it has higher quantities of vitamins and minerals and protective proteins with anti-cancer, anti-diabetic and anti-bacterial properties. In fact, it is as nutritious to humans as human milk.

Some chefs at the Camel Charisma event said the total reliance on bovine milk has resulted in a standardisation of flavour across dishes that use milk, which has reduced chefs’ willingness to experiment when they work with dairy products.

“There’s nothing we can actually experiment with, nothing we can actually go outside the box with,” said pastry chef Aarohi Sanghavi, owner of MÄKI Patisserie in Bengaluru. This, she said, is despite the fact that “camel milk is so different and it’s got so much going for it, texturally and flavour-wise”.

But Sanghavi has decided to attempt to introduce the milk into products at her establishment. Specifically, she plans to experiment with using camel milk in chocolates, custards and ice cream, and make nankhatai with camel ghee.

Rahul Sharma, group head chef of Araku Coffee, is thinking about adding camel milk lattes and “camel-chinos” to his menu. “It has a natural sweet profile and with little sugar being added, it acts as a dessert itself,” Sharma said.

He noted that because camel milk was similar to cow milk, using it as an ingredient was not a challenge. But consumer acceptance would be key to ensuring that such products remained available.

“In the end, if it’s just about doing 10 lattes in a day, it’s about creating a perspective and setting the right way of thinking in the consumer’s minds,” Sharma said. “It’s about, are you able to break that perception in people’s minds that this is not something usual and it is not something that will take a big toll on their mind to try?”

For this to happen, further initiatives to promote and develop the product are desperately needed, Camel Charisma said in a press release.

As Köhler-Rollefson sees it, popularising the product would be a major step toward helping the Raika community earn a livelihood and maintain their way of life.

“The most important part for me is this unique human-animal relationship,” she said. “It’s a way of ethically producing milk within planetary boundaries and a close relationship between humans and camels. I think it would be a waste to let it go.”