The domestication of cattle has provided humans with almost unlimited access to bovine milk and processed dairy products that are important human foods.They provide an excellent source to meet human nutritional demands for proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and minerals.Although regarded as a high-quality food source, cows’ milk has evolved to deliver optimized nutrition to the suckling calf and not as human food.Hence, there remains great potential to improve all major components of cows’ milk to further enhance benefits for human health and wellbeing tailored to the different stages of life and their specific nutritional demands.Compared with human milk, cows’ milk has a higher protein content, greater casein to whey protein ratio, lower lactose levels and more saturated and less unsaturated fats. Efforts to change bovine milk by conventional selective breeding approaches were largely unsuccessful. Technological progress for efficiently introducing targeted and precise genetic changes provides new opportunities to directly change specific characteristics of bovine milk. This includes humanizing bovine milk for superior infant nutrition or altering bovine milk to accommodate the different nutritional requirements of adolescents, adults, and elderlies. Early proof-of-principle studies aimed at improving cows’ milk by complementing it with additional antimicrobial human whey proteins used transgenic technology and were hampered by low acceptance. Since then technology has become much more refined and it is now possible to humanize cows’ milk without leaving a technological footprint. If this new, so-called genome editing technology will be received with greater levels of acceptance is still uncertain. Much will depend on our ability to develop proof of concept models. This is particularly important because milk is a very complex biological fluid and the changes resulting from a specific component can potentially lead to more wide-ranging implications. Only with appropriate animal models will we be able to fully evaluate potential risks and clearly demonstrate health benefits for consumers that could be delivered by these enhanced food products. Then it is up to the consumer to decide whether these new food products provide sufficient additional health benefits to outweigh any remaining technological risks.