- Sponsor Promotion -NZ only has a population of 5million, we can never compete for price against 500million middle class Chinese. How close is research to synthetic milk powder? Pilot products : Ice cream, cheese, and yoghurts using synthetic milk proteins are already on the market in limited quantities. Milk powder challenge : Fresh liquid milk analogues are progressing faster because they need fewer processing steps. Timeframe estimatesIndustry analysts predict proof-of-concept synthetic milk powders within 3–5 years , but mass-scale, cost-competitive production is probably 10+ years away .