Innovation

The Swedish food company Oatly has revolutionized the food market with their innovative dairy alternative made of 100% oats. The business was founded in the 1990s by Rickard Öste at Lund University and ever since then, the company has grown substantially, both internally and globally. The idea of creating dairy substitute products made from oats was first considered to be crazy by outside critics, but nowadays you can spot Oatly’s oat products in almost every grocery store and at cafés in Sweden, such as oat milk, oat yogurt and even oat ice cream etc.

Oatly’s plant-based products do not use up as many resources as normal dairy milk does. The fact that people buy oat milk as a substitute for milk, not because they need to, but because they want to, shows that Oatly, as well as the society, has come a long way towards a more sustainable thinking.

Inspiration

When Rickard Öste was experimenting on oats to make a substitute for cow milk, his goals were not to make the new product as environmentally friendly as possible. The idea was to invent a nutritious liquid product for those who could not or did not want to drink cow milk. He wished for everyone, regardless of religious beliefs or allergies to be able to drink milk. Furthermore, he wanted the new production to be resource efficient, hence not consume as many resources from the planet as dairy milk.

Although Oatly did not aim to become a sustainable company from the beginning, they have evolved into one. When we interviewed Anna Åhnberg, we asked her why she wanted to work for Oatly, and she answered, “The products and the believes here [at Oatly] is to create a more sustainable food system(...) I love the idea of having a product that can make it easy for people to make more sustainable choices in their everyday life.’’ Nowadays, Oatly is very aware of their positive impacts in the globe, and are actively working towards several of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Overall impact

Oatly works hard to protect the planet, which is clear when looking at the company’s values: Sustainability, nutrition health, and trust. The company creates products which are healthy for its consumers, hence Oatly’s oat products consist of more fiber, vitamins, and proteins than dairy product does. Those plant-based products also have less saturated fats than ordinary milk does.

The company claims that their plant-based products use less land and less energy, as well as releasing 80% less greenhouse gas emissions than ordinary animal-dairy does. In addition, the company has set a goal for itself - to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020.

Furthermore, this is done by trying to provoke and hence create a discussion upon the subject, which in turn creates awareness. Oatly also uses culture as a tool to reach new audiences, as well as the school kitchen, where a younger audience is introduced and taught about the benefits of oat products. This could initially teach the younger generation into thinking and act in a more sustainable way, as they take over the world.

Business benefit

The sustainable mindset has become the new norm, one could argue it is an established trend. This trend has not only benefited the environment, but also the company itself. Anna Åhnberg told us that Oatly is a very fast-growing company, “We are hiring like 10 people a month’’. During this growth, Oatly has expanded into new markets in 27 countries all over the world and are looking to expand further. Oatly’s expansion is not only increasing internal revenue, it is also creating workplaces and therefore reducing unemployment. Ultimately, this could fuel economic growth by increasing the overall GDP of affected countries, which in turn would increase the government’s ability to provide social welfare for its inhabitants. This is a great prove that working towards sustainability is also profitable.

Social and environmental benefit

One of humans greatest needs is food, regardless of how the society shapes and changes. With the ongoing population growth, it is believed that the food resources we currently use will not be enough. Therefore, it is crucial to find smarter ways to produce larger amounts of food, using less land. This is what Oatly does.

The traditional way of making milk and dairy products are through feeding food (like oats) to cows, who then process this into milk. In this scenario, the cows take up a lot of lands. If we were to only drink oat milk, this land could instead be used to plant even more oats, resulting in a larger quantity of production. This is, therefore, a resource efficient way to keep up with the growing population's needs.

Producing oat milk and oat products is a smart way to take care of the planet, hence this production has a lower contribution to the global warming than animal milk does. If the global warming is not slowed down, consequences can be many and devastating.

“I know that there is a lot of people who have anxiety about sustainability and are afraid that the world is ending” - Anna Åhnberg

With a growing temperature, the heat stresses could become a constant phenomenon, as result of how recklessly the planet has been treated. If companies and consumers do not think sustainable to protect the planet, like Oatly does, consequences might be no people or no planet and therefore, no business.

Interview

Anna Åhnberg, Sustainability Expert