* don't do the initial step where you almost boil the milk
* dissolve the powdered milk and starter yogurt using one of these [1]
* make the yogurt directly in the boxes ("tupperware") you'll be storing it in
* make large batches
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sch%C3%BCttelbecher...
You can’t buy 1 gallon/4 litres of yogurt for $5 as far as I can tell. Maybe there is an angle I’m not aware of.
Plus you can be free of all the preservatives.
This is the speech of a scaremonger: You might not be trying to scare folks, but you've certainly bought into it. Preservatives cut down on food waste and are an overall good for society. More folks would starve without these and more folks would wind up with foodborne illnesses.
I'll mention that salt and sugar are preservatives, we've just found better methods now. Are all of them good? Nope, but food preservation was never perfect. That doesn't make it worse now.
No fearmongering intended.
There’s lots of natural preservatives. But we know that’s not always the case with most commercial options.
Mozzarella is made with a sort of perpetual stew at the farm or milk factory, instead of adding a bacterial culture directly to milk like most cheeses.
In the Netherlands you can find dairy farms everywhere, and some of those have a shop with some range of milk or milk products, usually what they themselves prefer the most. They know how it works, so they can replicate it and it becomes no problem.
Don't make it sound difficult to bootstrap. You can just use some chickpeas or chilli crowns.
First there is a floor price on milk. Milk cannot legally be sold below that floor price to consumers.
Farmers are prohibited from selling fresh milk direct to consumers. It's illegal. Period. They can't gift it either. It has to go to a transformer to be mixed with, homogenized and pasteurized.
Dairies and cheese makers, with the proper license, buy fresh milk in bulk to be transformed.
Since yogurt, or cheese, is not milk, there is no floor price. Somehow this often cause the transformed product to cost less than the raw ingredients (milk) that goes into it if you were to purchase that milk as a consumer.
And of course, you can only buy pasteurized, homogenized milk, which is an entire other problems.
This is the case in Quebec, Canada. Other provinces have different but similar laws. The dairy industry is the only one that is protected in such a way, hence why OP commented how crazy the industry is here, as nothing else work that way.
Milk is about £0.64/l, so roughly equivalent if you add in the cost of heating it.
However, the price for live yoghurt is a different story - much more expensive, which is why I have recently started making my own.
Tip for UK readers: You can put an unopened 4pt plastic milk bottle in the freezer and it will keep as long as UHT. Defrosts in a few days in a fridge. (Was handy during COVID lockdowns)
UHT is usable, and doesn't need to be boiled, but for that added convenience it costs nearly twice as much.
The cheapest yoghurts have all a very bad taste and consistency in the mouth while those you will do at home taste on par with those you pay a premium for.
Even making your own yogurt is not cost efficient. It is literally cheaper to buy yogurt than the standard ordinary milk and sour it yourself. Cheese is even worse.
All the weird regulations, price control, quota, duties and import restrictions seem to ultimately benefit mostly the very large industrial transformers, leaving actual farmers with scraps and consumers with ballooning costs.