History of soya milk
The oldest evidence of the production of soy milk is a Chinese mural carved into a stone tablet. It shows a kitchen scene, proving that soya milk and tofu were produced in China in the period 25-220 AD. The earliest written reference to soya milk also appeared in China around 1500 AD, in a poem "Ode to Tofu" by Su Ping.The earliest European reference to soya milk was in 1665 by Domingo Fernandez de Navarrete and in 1790 by Juan de Loureiro, a Portuguese missionary who lived in Vietnam. All these early references to soy milk only mentioned soya milk as part of the process of making tofu. It was not until 1866 that the Frenchman Paul Champion, who had travelled in China, mentioned that the Chinese drank hot soya milk for breakfast.
Soya milk was first mentioned in the United States in 1896 by Henry Trimble in the American Journal of Pharmacy. In 1910, Li Yu-ying, a Chinese man living in Paris, set up the world's first soya milk factory. In 1917, the first commercial soya milk was produced in the US by J.A. Chard Soy Products in New York.
The first calcium-fortified soya milk was produced in 1931 by Madison Foods in Tennessee. This company was run by the faculty of Madison College. In 1939, Miller began producing canned liquid soya milk, called Soya La, because the dairy industry prevented Miller from calling the product "soya milk".