The Times Magazine 17number of factories it has around the world,
including one in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.
“That level of growth for a food and drink
company is phenomenal,” says Kiti Soininen,
director of food and drink research at Mintel,
one of many experts who believe that oat milk
is more than a passing fad. One in three Brits
have drunk plant-based milk in the past three
months, her firm calculates. If you look just at
those under the age of 45, that figure rises to
44 per cent. Consumption of dairy milk, in
contrast, is slowly but inexorably declining.
Considering lactose-intolerant consumers
number just 1 per cent in the UK and vegans
make up no more than 1.6 per cent, this
suggests millions of people, even those who
love cheese and steak, quite often pop a
carton of oat milk into their weekly basket.
Why? In the past few years evidence
has mounted that the methane produced
by the world’s 1.4 billion cows, burping and
farting, is causing serious global warming.
At Cop26 in Glasgow, US president Joe Biden
announced the Global Methane Pledge,
which aims to limit methane emissions by
30 per cent compared with 2020 levels, calling
methane “one of the most potent greenhouse
gases there is”.
“We know consumers are becoming
environmentally conscious,” says Eden
Plummer, a consumer insight director at
Kantar, which tracks Brits’ spending habits.
“In many cases they are choosing dairy
alternatives to be kinder to the planet, and
people believe oat milk to be the best choice
for the planet.”
This is the key reason why sales of plant
milk, and oat milk specifically, have rocketed.
A litre of European dairy milk (less damaging
to the environment than milk produced on
intensive American farms) causes about
2.2kg of CO 2 equivalent emissions, according
to research conducted by Oxford University.
This is more than twice the amount caused by
rice milk (0.9kg) and soya (0.9kg). Next comes
almond (0.7kg), with oat milk coming out the
best at 0.6kg.
Oatly has hired a third party to calculate
its carbon footprint – 0.51kg for its bestselling
barista milk. Crucially, unlike soya, it doesn’t
ruin a decent cup of coffee or tea. Even to me,
an avowed dairy drinker, it tastes quite nice.
But will switching from cow’s milk to oat
milk really make a substantial difference? “Are
you kidding me?” says Petersson, who seems
affronted that I am questioning his customers’
ability to change the world. “The impact of
animal-based agriculture is higher than all
transportation combined. So, does it have an
impact? Definitely it does.”
His maths is correct. The UN calculates
that the dairy industry alone is responsible for
3.4 per cent of all the world’s greenhouse gas
emissions, nearly as much as aviation (1.9 percent) and shipping (1.7 per cent) combined.
Forget foregoing transatlantic flights; we need
to ditch dairy.
It is a mission he has taken on with zeal but,
like Oatly as a brand, he manages to combine
the earnestness of a stroppy teen lecturing
their parents with some laid-back humour.
Throughout the interview he pops snus, that
peculiarly Swedish chewing tobacco, into his
mouth. I tell him I am surprised that someone
who bangs on about the health of oat milk is a
snus-chewer. “Is it good for you? Probably not.
F***, how can it be?” he says, and laughs.
Petersson is the face of Oatly, but he is not
its inventor. It was created in 1994 by brothers
Rickard and Björn Öste, Rickard being a food
scientist working at Lund University, which
had been researching lactose intolerance.
The brothers came up with a method using
enzymes to liquefy oats in a way that still
retained some fibre – a key nutrient lacking
in most plant milks.
Although the product enjoyed modest
success in Sweden, it was found only on the
food allergy shelves of supermarkets. In 2012,
Oatly was looking for a new chief executive
and a headhunter put forward Petersson, who
most recently had been running a backpack
company, after spending five years mostly
bumming around Costa Rica with his wife,
Karina, and young kids on an elongated
sabbatical, spending a windfall he got from
selling his nightclub and sushi bar business
in Malmö. I’m told by many locals it was the
place to hang out.
“I had never heard of Oatly,” confesses
Petersson, who only went to the interviewout of curiosity. “I thought it was a Dutch
multinational that was making granola.
I had no interest whatsoever in running
a food company.”
He was soon won over after tasting the
drink. “It was a product that I had been looking
for and never found.” Really? Yes, he insists.
“I loved the flavour of oats and the texture
and everything. So when I drank it, I just
thought: why isn’t everybody drinking this?”
He is not a vegan. “That’s not what this is
about. This is about getting a massive number
of people making small changes.” But he
clearly has an entrepreneurial flair that saw
oat milk could become huge. When he joined,
Oatly had 40 staff. It now has 1,478.
He puts it down to his dual heritage. “It
kind of defines who I am.” His Swedish father,
Roy, was in the shipping industry and died just
before Petersson took up the Oatly job. His
mother, Ayako, from Hyogo, Japan, comes
from a long line of restaurateurs.
When he was five years old, the family
(after a few years of living in Japan) moved to
the Swedish countryside. “Me and my family
were the only ones who looked like us. It was
so obvious that we were different on so many
levels.” It was ultimately “an advantage”, he
explains. “Being an entrepreneur means that
you always fight the big ones. And in order to
do that, you actually have to be different. You
have to do things differently.”
He set about fighting the big ones – in this
case the dairy industry – by transforming a
rather staid brand into something hip. “When
I entered the company everybody said, ‘You’ve
got to reach the mothers in the household.’THE DAIRY INDUSTRY PRODUCES MORE GREENHOUSE
GAS EMISSIONS THAN AVIATION OR SHIPPING
Toni PeterssonTOM JACKSON