Pistachio Milk vs Almond Milk: Nutrition, Calories and How Much Nut Is in Each

This is the nutrition companion to our main pistachio milk vs almond milk guide. That page handles taste and use. This one handles the labels, and it answers the question both cartons leave off the front: how much nut is in there.

How much nut is actually in nut milk?

Between 2% and 7%, if the nut is almond or hazelnut. We know because in Europe the law makes the brand say so.

Article 9(1)(d) of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 requires a quantitative declaration for any ingredient the product is named after. Call a drink an almond drink and you have to print the almond percentage. US rules carry no such requirement, which is why an American carton tells you nothing.

So we read the labels where the figure exists. On 2 October 2026 we compiled the declared headline-ingredient percentage of 54 plant drinks sold across Europe, the UK and Morocco: 28 nut drinks and 26 oat and soy drinks for comparison. The full dataset, one row per product with the ingredient list as published, is a CSV download, free to reuse with attribution.

Three things fall out of that table.

The typical almond drink is about 97% not-almond. Alpro declares 2.3% on four separate products, Bjorg declares 2.2% to 2.8% on five, Lidl's Vemondo declares 2.3% and Carrefour's own-label declares 2.8%. Those are the two biggest European brands and the own-labels of two of its biggest grocers. Every 7% figure in the set comes from a product sold as an "intense" or "purée" version at a premium.

The nut drink is the thinnest plant milk on the shelf. Oat drinks declare a median of 10% oats and soy drinks 8.7% soybeans, three to four times the nut figure. The thinnest cereal or legume drink in the whole set, Aldi's own-label soya at 7%, still declares more of its headline ingredient than 25 of the 28 nut drinks do.

Sugar outranks the nut in the ingredient list on four labels. Alpro's hazelnut drink lists sugar second and hazelnuts third at 2.8%, and Lidl's Vemondo hazelnut drink does the same at 2.5%. Alpro's vanilla almond drink and the Condorelli pistachio bottle below are the other two. Ingredients run in descending order of weight, so on those four packs there is more sugar in the carton than nut.

Can you work out the US figure from the panel?

Yes, within about a percentage point, and here is the check that shows it.

Ecomil's cashew drink lists three things: water, cashew at 6%, sea salt. Nothing else contributes calories, protein or fat. So divide each panel figure by USDA's analytical composition for raw cashew and you should recover 6%:

All three routes land either side of the declared 6%. The method works.

It stops working cleanly when anything else is in the carton. Ecomil's almond drink also declares 6%, but it adds tapioca starch, which carries calories and no protein, so the calorie route reads high at 6.0% while protein reads 4.7% and fat 3.8%.

The gap between those two numbers is worth understanding, because it is not an error. A declared percentage tells you how much nut went into the tank. The panel tells you how much of that nut ended up dissolved in the glass. Almond pulp is conventionally strained out and takes protein and fat with it, so for almond the panel figure sits below the declared one. The panel figure is the one you drink.

So read the panel-derived number as a floor, and trust it most where the ingredient list is water, nut and salt. That second dataset is also downloadable.

What the US cartons work out to

Start with Blue Diamond, because it is the control. The American carton declares no percentage at all, and the arithmetic puts it at 1.7% to 2.0% almond. That is the same answer the European labels print for the equivalent drink. A US unsweetened almond milk is a 2% almond drink; it just does not have to say so.

Elmhurst is the interesting one. Its list is water, pistachios and Himalayan pink salt, so both routes are clean, and they agree: 6.0% from the calories, 6.2% from the protein. Elmhurst is also the only US brand in this category that quantifies anything, with "27 Whole California Pistachios In Every Glass" printed on the carton. Our figures imply 14.3 to 14.9 g of pistachio in a 240 ml glass. Divide by 27 and you get 0.53 to 0.55 g a kernel, which is an ordinary pistachio. So three things line up on one number: the calories, the protein, and the count the brand prints on the box.

Three Trees comes out highest at roughly 7.5%, and it is a pistachio and almond blend, so that is total nut rather than pistachio alone.

The headline comparison, then: a US pistachio milk carries about three times as much nut as a US unsweetened almond milk, and at the top of the category it carries as much nut as the most concentrated almond drink in our dataset. Our separate pistachio milk label study recorded the price of that: $4.66 to $9.65 per liter against about $1.94 for a benchmark almond milk.

The numbers per cup

Published panel figures rather than category averages. Unsweetened versions, per the serving the pack declares.

Elmhurst publishes only calories and protein online, which is its own small finding and the reason our pistachio milk nutrition facts study exists. Note the calcium row: the fortified almond milk carries ten times the calcium of the unfortified pistachio milk. Fortification, not the nut, decides that line.

How much sugar is in almond milk?

Hardly any of it comes from the almond. USDA gives raw almonds 4.35 g of sugars per 100 g, so a 2.3% almond drink can draw at most about 0.10 g per 100 ml from the nut, a quarter of a gram in a cup. Unsweetened cartons duly declare 0 g.

Which means the sugar line is a direct readout of the sugar bowl. A panel showing 7 g of sugars per cup got roughly 6.8 g of that added, and Táche's Original Blend panel says exactly that: 7 g total sugars, 6 g of them added.

Pistachio shifts the floor slightly. Raw pistachios carry 7.66 g of sugars per 100 g, so a 6% pistachio drink can reach about 0.46 g per 100 ml, a gram in a cup, with nothing added. An unsweetened pistachio milk declaring 1 g of sugar has not necessarily been sweetened.

Calories, fat and protein

The calorie gap is wider than most comparisons admit. Unsweetened almond milk comes in at 25 calories a cup. Pistachio milk at 80 to 100 is three to four times that, and the nut is not what causes it: pistachios and almonds sit within 20 calories of each other per 100 g, at 560 and 579. The carton simply holds three times as much nut.

Fat follows the same line, and takes the body of the drink with it. Three Trees puts 8 g of fat in a cup against Almond Breeze's 2 g, which is where the creaminess comes from. Both fats are mostly unsaturated.

Protein is low in both and higher in pistachio milk: 3 to 4 g a cup against 1 g. Neither is a protein source you would plan around. If that is what you want from a plant milk, the declared percentages in our dataset point straight at soy, where the median carton declares 8.7% soybeans, and our pistachio milk vs soy milk comparison goes into it.

Which is better for weight loss?

For fewest calories, unsweetened almond milk, clearly: 25 a cup against 80 or more. Earlier versions of this page put the gap at 20 calories, which the panels do not support, and we have corrected it.

The gap matters less than it looks in a latte, where you are drinking a lot of milk, and more than it looks in a coffee, where you are drinking an ounce. The bigger lever either way is buying unsweetened. A sweetened carton can add more sugar in one cup than the whole calorie difference between the two milks.

Neither drink is a weight-loss food. They are light, flexible swaps for dairy, and the pistachio one costs more because there is more nut in it.

The one bottle that declares a pistachio percentage

Searching for a European pistachio drink turned up exactly one with a number on it, and the number is 2%.

Condorelli sells a 1 liter Sicilian latte di mandorla e pistacchio whose list reads: water, sugar, almonds (9%), pistachios (2%), emulsifier E473, L-ascorbic acid, flavorings, copper chlorophyllin. So the bottle holds four and a half times as much almond as pistachio, sugar comes second by weight, and the panel declares 13.7 g of sugars per 100 ml, which is 33 g in a 240 ml cup. The green is a declared color, copper chlorophyllin.

That pattern is familiar from the rest of this site. When the percentage is printed you can see what you are buying, and the answer is often less nut and more sugar than the front of the pack suggests. Our audit of 14 jars of pistachio cream found declared pistachio running 15% to 65%, with more sugar than pistachio in 8 of the 13 jars that published both.

Environmental footprint

Life-cycle data compiled by Our World in Data from Poore & Nemecek puts every plant milk far below dairy on water use, with almond the most water-hungry of the plant milks it covers. Pistachio is not in that dataset, so there is no peer-reviewed figure to quote for it.

What this page's own numbers do let you say is narrower and sturdier. Almost all of a nut drink's orchard water footprint rides on its nut content, and the declared percentages vary by more than three times within almond alone. A 7% almond drink carries roughly three times the orchard water of a 2.3% almond drink of the same nut and the same origin. Comparing a pistachio milk with an almond milk per liter of drink therefore compares two different nut concentrations as much as two different crops. Táche, citing UNESCO-IHE figures, reports almond's water footprint at roughly four times pistachio's; that is a brand claim rather than a published life-cycle study, and it is the only pistachio figure we have found.

How to read either label

Four lines settle it at the shelf.

• The percentage, if you are in Europe. It is printed next to the name or in the ingredient list. Under 3% is the standard supermarket formula.
• Where the nut sits in the list. Ingredients run by weight. If sugar comes before the nut, there is more sugar than nut.
• Protein, if you are in the US. No percentage is printed, so the protein line is the best proxy you have. One gram a cup is a 2% almond drink. Three grams is a 6% pistachio drink.
• Calcium and the vitamins. An unfortified nut milk carries a tenth of the calcium of a fortified one. If it is replacing dairy, this is the line that matters most.

To skip the whole question, make it at home and choose the ratio yourself. For which carton is worth the money, see best pistachio milk; for the broader health picture, is pistachio milk good for you? and pistachio milk benefits.

Methodology, limitations and corrections

We compiled the declared percentages on 2 October 2026 from Open Food Facts label transcriptions for the almond, hazelnut, oat and soy categories, and from brand product pages for the three Ecomil drinks. A product was included if it was sold as a drink named after a single nut, grain or legume, and if a transcribed ingredient list carried a declared percentage for that ingredient. Flavored and sweetened versions are included and marked as such in the CSV, so you can filter them out; excluding them does not move the nut median off 2.8%.

Five things limit this.

The declared percentages are label transcriptions, not photographs of labels we held. Open Food Facts is contributor-maintained. We used only the percentage printed inside the transcribed ingredient text and ignored the estimated percentages Open Food Facts computes from list order, which are a different thing entirely. Where a figure looked unusual we read the surrounding list rather than taking the number alone.

Some percentages sit inside a compound ingredient, as in Bjorg's "lait d'amandes (eau, amandes 2,8%)" or Alpro's "soya base (98,8%) (water, hulled soya beans (8,7%))". Strictly that leaves it open whether the figure is a share of the sub-component or of the finished product. One Bjorg label settles it for Bjorg by printing "pourcentage exprimé sur produit fini". For the others the ambiguity moves the figure by less than a tenth of a percentage point, so it cannot change any conclusion here.

The panel arithmetic assumes 100 ml weighs 100 g. Plant drinks are slightly denser than water, so the computed percentages run about 1% to 3% high on that account. The effect is far smaller than the spread we are describing.

The panel arithmetic is a floor, not a measurement. It recovers the nut dissolved in the finished drink. Where pulp is strained out or starch, oil or sugar is added, it reads low or high respectively, and we say which in each row of the dataset. The Táche row is protein and fat only, because cane sugar makes its calorie route meaningless.

One row contradicts itself and we left it in flagged. The Táche Original Blend panel comes from a retailer listing that labels the product unsweetened while the panel declares 6 g of added sugars and the list puts cane sugar third. We flagged that discrepancy in August 2026 and have not resolved it.

Only one pistachio drink anywhere carried a declared percentage, so the pistachio row in the first table is a single product and should be read as one data point rather than a category. If you know of another, or you are a brand willing to publish your percentage, the contact route is on our about page and we will update this page and say so. Material corrections are logged below.

Citing this study

You are welcome to cite or reproduce the findings, tables and both datasets (declared percentages, panel-derived figures), including for commercial publication, with attribution to pistachiomilk.org and a link to this page (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0). A suggested citation:

Ricci, E. (2026). How Much Nut Is in Nut Milk: Declared and Panel-Derived Nut Content in 54 Plant Drinks. pistachiomilk.org. https://pistachiomilk.org/pistachio-milk-vs-almond-milk/

Journalists and researchers who need a figure checked, the source links resent or the data in another format can get in touch via the about page.

Version history: v1.0, 2 October 2026: first publication of the nut-content dataset (54 declared percentages, 7 panel-derived figures). This replaced an earlier version of the page whose per-cup table gave approximate category ranges rather than published panel figures; the calorie gap between unsweetened pistachio and almond milk was stated as roughly 20 calories a cup and is in fact 55 or more.

The bottom line

Both drinks are mostly water. The difference between them is how much nut is suspended in it, and that single number drives the calories, the fat, the protein and the price.

An unsweetened almond milk is about 2% almond, whether or not the carton admits it. A pistachio milk is about 6%, and the better one is closer to 8%. Buy unsweetened and fortified either way, and if you want the pistachio flavor without paying three times for it, the ratio is yours to set at home.