Proposal:Milk types

Milk types
Proposal status:	Draft (under way)
Proposed by:	Trainsgender
Applies to:
Definition:	The types of milk offered, used in drinks like coffee or hot chocolate.
Rendered as:	Not rendered.
Draft started:	2025-02-24

Proposal

This proposal aims to unambiguously indicate the types of milk (both animal and plant-based milks) a customer can choose to have included in beverages like coffee, hot chocolate or tea, at places like a restaurant, café or shop. Milk sold as a drink on its own is out of the scope of this proposal, as this can already be indicated with drink:*=*.

Rationale

Currently, drink:*=* is sometimes used to indicate this, but this creates ambiguity. For example: if a coffee shop is tagged with drink:oat_milk=served, does this mean the business serves oat milk, or one can get oat milk in coffee? Common sense would imply the latter, but the definition of drink:*=* implies the former. This creates ambiguity, which is even more problematic in cases like drink:hot_milk=*.

Therefore, I suggest to use a different tagging scheme to specifically indicate what types of milks are used in milk-based beverages. I propose to use subkeys of milk:*=* with values similar to those used in the drink:*=* scheme, allowing one to indicate whether this type of milk applies to served drinks, sold drinks, takeaway drinks etc.

I see two main use cases for including this information in OSM:

• Dietary restrictions, such as veganism.
• Allergies: common allergens include lactose, casein and soy.

While some of this can already be indicated with the diet:*=* scheme, it does not specifically cover milk-based drinks. For example, a coffee shop might not offer any vegan cakes, therefore not qualifying as diet:vegan=yes, but might offer plant-based milks in their coffee.

Tagging

This tagging scheme is intended to be extendable. Proposed tags for some common types of milk:

• Animal origin:
  • milk:cow=*
  • milk:buffalo=*
  • milk:goat=*
  • milk:sheep=*
  • milk:camel=*
  • milk:horse=*
  • milk:animal=* (if the specific origin isn't known)
• Plant-based:
  • milk:soy=*
  • milk:rice=*
  • milk:almond=*
  • milk:coconut=*
  • milk:oat=*
  • milk:plant-based=* (if the specific origin isn't known)

milk=* (without any subkeys) could be used as well, but it provides very little information over just not adding this information at all.

Examples

There's no uses of these tags in OSM as of yet, because an automated edit prevents their use; see changeset 162571268, where I tried to introduce this tag on a coffee shop. (There's no changeset discussion because I discussed this automated edit in personal communication with the user.)

Rendering

This tag shouldn't be rendered on general-purpose maps, it could be rendered on maps specifically aimed at showing vegan-friendly, lactose-free etc. places.

Features/Pages affected

The introduction of this tagging scheme would mainly affect:

• amenity=restaurant
• amenity=cafe
• amenity=fast_food
• amenity=bar

drink:*=* would also need to be updated to clarify the difference between drink:milk=* (and similar keys) and milk:*=*.

External discussions

This scheme has been discussed in the OSM BE Matrix room (https://matrix.to/#/#osmbe:matrix.org).

Comments

Please comment on the discussion page.