Hi I work for Oatly and I have some thoughts on this whole thing. to be crystal clear I'm not speaking for the company, just for myself and my own process with this. here we go:
imagine you're a CPG company with sustainability as your main mission. you go so far as to say you're a sustainability company before anything else. you have goals of disrupting food systems, changing the way people eat, + impacting climate change globally.
we are in a climate crisis. right now for example, ice sheets are melting, permafrost soil microbes might be changing, and I don't need to tell you about extreme weather. a crisis is something that needs to be addressed head-on, as soon as possible.
as a sustainability company that makes a food product, the main way you can offset carbon emissions is to get people to switch from dairy to plant-based milk. people are down, so much so that the demand for your product is through the roof, + you can't make it fast enough.
so you need more factories. you could wait until your profits allow you to build those factories yourself, but it would take a long time, and due to the current climate crisis that's time we don't have. so you look into investment.
the amount of $$ you need necessitates partnering with a private equity firm. the top private equity firms in the world all have questionable interests - insurance, oil, weapons manufacturing, big pharma, political campaigns, deforestation, ISIL, etc. (u can google this).
so you think, why not go for the biggest one. why not get the most investment from an influential firm, signaling that investing millions into a sustainability company is a smart move, keeping those millions away from malevolent interests. here’s a very simplified chart:
there's a reason it's called a climate crisis. it's a current crisis, and reversing any bit of it with any amount of urgency under our current capitalist system takes a lot of power (see: money) behind that mission.
it’s no mystery that capitalism is evil. but unless Oatly is expected to dismantle that system, it has to be beneficial in other ways. building factories to make more oatmilk isn’t the only way, but it also isn’t “the Oatly way” to tout good deeds so I’ll just leave that there.
maybe it's because I'm in the middle of rewatching the Good Place, but for me what it comes back to is motivation and trust. earlier this week, my brilliant coworker @nannerpoon said that she trusts this move because she trusts Oatly, and Oatly's motivation.
maybe they are big greedy liars like many seem to claim, or maybe they have big pie in the sky sustainability goals and are making good on their promise to be a good company in the most impactful ways that they can (like they've been doing for 25+ years).
what I know is that the freedom I have in my job to support causes, people, mutual aid initiatives, events, and fundraisers that align with not only Oatly's but my values, to trust my gut, lead with kindness, and use my budget for good, is unlike anything I ever imagined.
anyway, I'm just an omnivorous employee with a liberal arts degree who cares deeply about the environment and her community, who knows that a significant shift in consumption away from dairy has the potential to have a huge impact on the current climate crisis.
read it from the oat's mouth here. https://www.oatly.com/int/climate-and-capital
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