As more and more people are looking for alternatives to traditional dairy products, the Swedish oat milk brand Oatly has exploded across the United Stated in recent years. Now the company sees huge opportunities in China.
Oatly wants to make it easy for people to turn what they eat and drink into personal moments of healthy joy without recklessly taxing the planet’s resources in the process. So, the Swedish drinks company helps farmers shift away from livestock farming and cut climate impact with its own oat milk brand
Oat Milk From Sweden
Oatly was founded in the 1990s and is based on Swedish research from Lund University. The company’s patented enzyme technology copies nature’s own process and turns fiber rich oats into nutritional liquid food that is perfectly designed for humans.
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The company operates out of the southern region of Sweden with Headquarters in Malmö with Production & Development Center situated in Landskrona. The Oatly brand is available in more than 20 countries throughout Europe, USA and Asia.
Extremely high demand in the US
Now, US demand for the company’s products has far outstripped supply, prompting people to sell cartons of Oatly on Amazon for up to $25, more than three times the retail price.
The farmers do not need any dairy cattle to produce milk. Instead of using all these oats for animal feed, they can now produce an oat milk drink and tap into the growing market for dairy alternatives across the country and the world.
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The market for cow’s milk in Sweden is waning, expected to decline by 2.5%, while that for plant-based alternatives like soy, almond and oat milk is expected to grow by more than 5% this year, according to market research firm Euromonitor International.
Environmentally friendly milk
The rearing of livestock and meat consumption accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Alongside carbon emissions from deforestation (for pasture or crops to feed animals), the livestock sector is also the single biggest human-related source of methane (from cattle) and nitrous oxide emissions (from fertilizer and manure), two particularly potent greenhouse gases.
“We were growing really healthy in Europe and we’ve been there for a while, but then we entered the United States and the craze started,” Oatly CEO Toni Petersson said. Today, the Swedish company remains independent and dedicated to upgrading the lives of individuals and the general well-being of the planet through a lineup of original oat drinks.
On current trends, by 2050 we will be growing more crops to feed directly to animals than ourselves. Even small shifts to feeding crops to humans instead of livestock would lead to significant increases in food availability.
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Growing popularity
Oatly’s popularity in the United States, driven by coffee drinkers who love it in lattes, prompted the company to open a factory in New Jersey this year, its first outside of Sweden. It’s opening another one in Utah next year, and one in the Netherlands to cope with demand in the United Kingdom and Germany.
Despite struggling to fill orders in Western markets, Oatly is now trucking ahead with an aggressive push into Asia.
Oat Milk From Sweden, written by Tor Kjolberg