Plant-based dairy alternatives are purchased by consumers for environmental, nutritional, or health-related reasons. Yet, some plant-based alternatives require large quantities of water and materials to produce. Additionally, these products are transported long distances to retail stores, such as almond products produced in California. A comparative midpoint life cycle assessment (LCA) is presented to evaluate the environmental impacts, and in particular embodied energy, and embodied water of conventional dairy milk with two plant-based alternatives: almond milk and soy milk. The scope of the study considers the life cycle stages of agricultural production, transportation to the processing plant, milk processing, transportation to the retail store in Chicago, and retail. A volumetric functional unit (FU), liter of milk, and nutritional FU, kilogram of protein, were used for comparison. Data were compiled from the LCA literature and U.S. patents, and the TRACI, BEES+, and Cumulative Energy Demand impact assessment methods were used. Monte Carlo simulation was used for uncertainty analysis associated with all inputs in the LCA model. It was found that the dominant life cycle stages for dairy, soy, and almond milk are the production and retail phases from a cradle-to-retail perspective. Dairy milk had the highest impacts in 6 of the 12 impact categories, whereas soy milk had the highest impacts in 4 categories using a volumetric FU. Almond milk has the highest impacts in noncarcinogenics largely from the use of zinc fertilizer and water use from irrigation. Almond milk has the highest impacts in all impact categories with 1 kg of protein, with results at least five times higher than soy milk, and at least two times higher than dairy milk in all impact categories. In nutrition, almond milk provides disadvantages due to its low protein content compared with dairy milk. Yet, protein has only one nutritional benefit, and there are other positive and negative nutritional benefits of these products to consider. The study illustrates that FU choice has a strong influence on the food product LCA results and interpretations and suggests that 2 or more FUs are necessary for food LCA studies. It may be desirable in future work to compare additional nutritional FUs, such as calories, to inform consumer choice and integrate nutritional and environmental assessments of food products.