How much coconut is in your coconut milk?

Coconut milk is a staple ingredient in many favourite recipes. It’s used by cuisines from all over Asia and other parts of the tropics to add richness and depth to both sweet and savoury dishes. In Australia, it’s estimated that the retail and food service sectors will spend $340 million on coconut milk for cooking in 2026.

There’s certainly a wide variety of coconut milk options to be found in our supermarkets. Name-brand and home-brand varieties are plentiful, and you’ll also find some organic products.

Then there are light coconut milks, coconut creams and light coconut creams. With so much to choose from, you’d be forgiven for being a little perplexed about which one to choose.

So what’s the difference between products, and which one offers the best value for money?

What’s the difference?

If you’ve ever wondered about the difference between all of the different coconut milks and creams on offer, the short answer is fat content: coconut milk has higher water content and coconut cream has more fat.

Both are made from coconut extract made by processing coconut flesh. Different brands of the coconut milk we found in supermarkets contained between 45% and 89% coconut, the other content being mostly water, with some also including additives such as stabilisers, emulsifiers and thickeners.

If you extend the comparison to include coconut creams and light versions, things become even more confusing. Light coconut milks contain even more water than the regular versions, and the products we looked at contained anywhere from 19% to 63% coconut. 

The most premium coconut creams contain up to 100% coconut, while other brands can contain as little as 45%. The light creams might have as little as 32% coconut and as much as 74%. 

In other words, some brands of light coconut milk contain more coconut than other products sold as coconut cream. 

We asked FSANZ (Food Safety Australia and New Zealand) about how these products are classified. While the relevant Food Standards code specifies that characterising information (in this case, the amount of coconut) must be declared as a percentage, it does not specify the amount of coconut that must be present in coconut milk.

For consumers, that means you need to pay attention to the label to figure out exactly how much coconut you’re getting.

What’s in your coconut milk?

For this article, we’re focusing on standard coconut milks. We looked at the ingredients in 10 varieties from Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and IGA, comparing the cost and percentage of coconut in each tin to figure out how much coconut you’re actually getting. 

The different terms used to describe the ingredients in the coconut milks can be confusing, with the main ingredient sometimes described as coconut extract, coconut kernel extract or coconut milk.

These are all essentially the same thing: the flesh of the coconut is grated, soaked and/or blended with water and then pressed to extract a liquid. To produce coconut milk, this extract is then mixed with water and sometimes additives, such as guar gum, that help stop the water and coconut liquid from separating. 

Of the products we looked at, Ayam 100% Natural Coconut Milk had the most coconut, with 89%. The only other ingredient was water.

Next was the Aldi Asia Green Garden coconut milk. It contains 75% coconut, with the remaining ingredients being water and the stabiliser 412 (guar gum). 

The products containing the third-highest amount of coconut in our analysis were the two organic products in our sample – Coles Organic Coconut Milk and Woolworths Macro Wholefoods Organic Coconut Milk. Both contained 74% coconut extract, and both also contain guar gum. 

The best-tasting coconut milk

The quality of the coconut milk you’re using can have a huge effect on the flavour of the dishes you cook – this flavour can be impacted by not only the amount of the coconut in the product, but the additives (or lack of additives) it might contain.

Other aspects such as fat content, processing and formulation, as well as how old the product is or how it has been stored, can also have an impact on flavour.

CHOICE home economist and expert taster, Fiona Mair, sampled the 10 varieties of coconut milk we compared in a blind tasting. She assessed each sample for texture, taste and aroma, and appearance. 

Fiona’s pick was Aldi’s Asia Green Garden Coconut Milk, which she described as having “lovely thickness and good flavour”, adding that it had a good aroma and a good amount of solid cream.

This product is 75% coconut kernel extract and costs just $1.69 for a 400ml tin, making it the cheapest of the products we compared. This also makes it the best value product, in terms of the cost per 100ml of coconut.

Not so pleasant was the Pandaroo Premium Coconut Milk. This product has the least amount of coconut extract of any of the products we tested: just 45%. Fiona described it as having a “chemical, metallic taste, an unpleasant flavour and oily mouthfeel”. 

Fiona also wasn’t a fan of the Ayam coconut milk. She described it as having an “unpleasant aftertaste and aroma”. This product has the most coconut of any of the products we compared – 89%. It was also one of only two that didn’t include any additives, the other being TCC brand. 

Overall, there was quite a lot of variation between the brands. “Some were quite solid… some were quite watery,” Fiona says. “A few had quite a metallic taste, and a couple were quite sweet”. 

To read Fiona’s assessment of each of the products, check out the taste test results below.

So if you’re choosing coconut milk for your next curry, be sure to read the ingredients and remember, price is not always an indicator of quality: the cheapest product in our comparison (Aldi Asia Green Garden) contained the second-highest amount of coconut and was rated the tastiest, while the second-most expensive (Trident) was only 60% coconut. 

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Margaret Rafferty

Margaret Rafferty joined CHOICE in 2018 as a Content editor and since then has filled the roles of Commissioning editor, Managing editor and now Editorial consultant. Margaret has written on a wide variety of topics and enjoys making complex subjects easy to understand. With over 20 years of media experience, Margaret brings a strong storytelling background to CHOICE. She works closely with people across the organisation to help tell stories that make a positive difference to people and is passionate about uncovering bad practices and helping Australians to avoid falling victim to shonky products and services. LinkedIn

Margaret Rafferty joined CHOICE in 2018 as a Content editor and since then has filled the roles of Commissioning editor, Managing editor and now Editorial consultant. Margaret has written on a wide variety of topics and enjoys making complex subjects easy to understand. With over 20 years of media experience, Margaret brings a strong storytelling background to CHOICE. She works closely with people across the organisation to help tell stories that make a positive difference to people and is passionate about uncovering bad practices and helping Australians to avoid falling victim to shonky products and services. LinkedIn