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Silk (brand)

American brand of dairy substitute products

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 16, 2026
Entity authorityQ7515167
Source-derived summary

Silk is an American brand of dairy-substitute products (including soy milk, soy yogurt, almond milk, almond yogurt, cashew milk, coconut milk, oat milk, and other dairy-alternative products) currently owned by Danone after it purchased WhiteWave Foods in 2016.

History

Whitewave Foods was founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 1977 by Steve Demos, initially focusing on soy and tofu products.

In 2002 WhiteWave, Inc was sold to Dean Foods for over $300 million. According to Silk's web site in August 2009, all its soy beans are sourced from North America including organic and non-GMO soybeans.

In January 2010, the company introduced Silk Pure Almond, an almond milk, and its first non-soy-based product.

In 2013, WhiteWave Foods separated from Dean Foods, and became an independent, publicly traded company.

Silk has been a five-year recipient of the Green Power Leadership Award from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In July 2016 it was announced that the multinational company Danone would purchase WhiteWave Foods for $10.4 billion. The acquisition was completed in April 2017 and newly formed company was named "DanoneWave"

Lawsuit

In the fall of 2009 the Pioneer Press reported that the Cornucopia Institute had made complaints to the U.S. Department of Agriculture accusing Silk producer Dean Foods and its WhiteWave Foods division, of shifting their products away from organics without properly notifying retailers or consumers. According to the Star Telegram and other news sources, Silk brand soy milk was made using organic soybeans switched to conventional soybeans while maintaining the same UPC barcodes and prices on the Silk products while replacing the word "organic" with "natural" on the Silk product packaging.

Editorial summary

“Silk (brand)” enters the record as american brand of dairy substitute products. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Silk, brand and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2016, 1977, 2002, 2009—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1978. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Silk, brand and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Silk (brand)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Silk, brand and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7515167. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016, 1977, 2002 and 2009.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Silk (brand)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Silk (brand) primary sources, Silk (brand) archive and Silk research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Silk (brand)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.