100 free Milk trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
74 free milk trivia questions with answers. Seventy-four questions on milk and dairy, from the glass on the table to the industry behind it. The science round covers why milk is white, what lactose actually is, how many adults cannot digest it, what pasteurisation and homogenisation really do, UHT, colostrum, casein and the animals whose milk is more than half fat. Then the dairy aisle: cheese from Emmental's holes to Sardinia's maggot cheese, the bacteria in yogurt, how butter and buttermilk are made, Häagen-Dazs's invented name and what legally counts as ice cream. Plus which country produces the most milk, why India overtook America, and the breed that makes up 90% of US herds. The rest is history and culture. Gail Borden's condensed milk, the first glass bottle and paper carton, missing children on cartons, Tetra Pak, milk bags in Canada, Britain's electric milk floats, the milk snatcher, 'got milk?' and its Michael Bay debut, World Milk Day, oat milk's Swedish inventor, the Cleopatra milk-bath myth, and Milk Duds. It suits a food round at a pub quiz, a school lesson or a dairy-industry team social. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the products, people and processes involved, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each explanation.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country is the world's largest producer of milk?
India
It is also the top exporter of skimmed milk powder and the biggest producer and consumer of buffalo milk.
Q 02India overtook which country in 1998 to become the world's largest milk producer?
The USA
Operation Flood, launched in 1970, was the world's largest dairy development programme and turned a milk-deficient nation into the top producer.
Q 03Milk looks white because light is scattered by fat globules and by tiny clusters of which protein?
Casein
Casein micelles are just large enough to deflect light and make up about 80% of the protein in cow's milk.
Q 04The main sugar in milk, lactose, is a disaccharide made of glucose and which other sugar?
Galactose
Lactose intolerance is simply the lack of the enzyme lactase needed to split the two apart.
Q 05Roughly what share of adults worldwide are affected by lactose malabsorption?
About 65%
It is rarest among people of Northern European descent and most common, at around 90%, in people of East Asian descent.
Q 06Pasteur's 1860s experiments showed heat could stop unwanted microbes in what?
Wine
He worked out the gentler method during an 1864 summer holiday in Arbois; heating wine to preserve it was already known in China by 1117.
Q 07Standard 'high temperature short time' pasteurisation heats milk to 72°C for how long?
15 seconds
That is enough to kill pathogenic bacteria and keep the milk safe for up to three weeks if it stays refrigerated.
Q 08UHT milk is heated above roughly what temperature for a couple of moments?
140°C
That is the temperature required to kill bacterial spores; the process was developed in the 1960s and reached shops in the 1970s.
Q 09Homogenisation stops milk from separating by doing what to its fat globules?
Breaking them into tiny even droplets
Left alone, the fat rises and collects as a layer of cream on top.
Q 10Which breed accounts for about 90% of dairy cows in the United States?
Holstein
The black-and-white Friesian breed also makes up about 85% of the British dairy herd.
Q 11Milk from Jersey and Guernsey cows has a golden tinge because of what?
Carotene in the fat
The small Channel Island breed's milk is also unusually high in butterfat.
Q 12Which animals' milk can contain more than 50% fat, the highest of any mammal?
Seals and whales
At the other end of the scale, donkey and horse milk have the lowest fat content.
Q 13Which fermented drink from Central Asia is made from mare's milk?
Kumis
Mare's milk has more sugar than cow's or goat's, so the drink ends up mildly alcoholic.
Q 21Dulce de leche, the caramel spread of Latin America, is made by slowly heating milk with what?
Sugar
Customs records show a version called manjar being imported into Argentina from Chile as early as 1693.
Q 22Gail Borden received a patent in 1856 for condensing milk using what?
A vacuum
His condensery in Connecticut opened the same year, and Civil War demand for the product made his fortune.
Q 23The first commercial glass milk jar patent in the United States was granted in 1878 to whom?
George Henry Lester
Hervey Thatcher's 'Common Sense Milk Jar' with its waxed paper disc followed in 1884 and became the familiar model.
Q 14The fizzy fermented milk drink from the Caucasus is made by adding what to milk?
Kefir grains
The 'grains' are a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts, not cereal grains at all.
Q 15The word 'yogurt' comes from which language?
Turkish
It is related to a verb meaning to knead or to thicken, and appears in Uyghur texts from before the year 1000.
Q 16Butter is roughly what percentage butterfat?
About 81%
It is made by churning cream until the fat and protein separate from the buttermilk.
Q 17What is whey?
The liquid left after curdling
It is a by-product of cheesemaking and is the basis of ricotta and of Norway's brown cheese.
Q 18The earliest archaeological evidence of cheesemaking, around 5500 BC, comes from which modern country?
Poland
Strainers coated with milk-fat molecules were found in Kuyavia; Egyptian tomb murals show cheese about 2000 BC.
Q 19Paneer, the fresh curd of South Asian cooking, is set with what rather than rennet?
An acid such as lemon juice
It does not melt, which is why it holds its shape in curries.
Q 20Ghee, essential to Indian cooking and Hindu ritual, is a type of what?
Clarified butter
The milk solids and water are cooked off, leaving pure fat that keeps without refrigeration.
Q 24John Van Wormer of which city patented the gable-topped 'Pure-Pak' milk carton in 1915?
Toledo, Ohio
It could be folded, glued, filled and sealed at the dairy, and it eventually pushed out the glass bottle.
Q 25In the 1980s, US milk cartons famously carried photos of what?
Missing children
The hope was that a breakfast-table glance would jog someone's memory and lead to a tip to police.
Q 26Tetra Pak, the Swedish packaging giant, took its name from a carton of which shape?
Tetrahedron
Ruben Rausing built the company on Erik Wallenberg's plastic-coated paper design, sold under the slogan 'No more crying over spilt milk'.
Q 27Milk in Canada is commonly sold in bags holding how much?
1 1/3 litres
Bags hold about a litre in South America, Iran, Israel and much of Europe, and half a litre in India.
Q 28By 1967, Britain's battery-powered milk floats had given the country what distinction?
Most electric vehicles in the world
Battery-powered floats were first introduced in 1889 and spread widely from 1931.
Q 29Why did doorstep milk delivery decline sharply in the second half of the 20th century?
Home fridges and supermarkets
Once households could store milk for days, the daily round lost its reason to exist.
Q 30'Milk snatcher' Thatcher ended free school milk for children of which ages?
Seven to eleven
Younger children kept their third of a pint a day; the cut was part of wider spending reductions in the early 1970s.