Climate labelling: why not?, for Oatly
Our campaign to ignite Oatly’s call for mandatory carbon labelling across all food and drink (especially dairy).
Context
Oatly has been publishing its climate footprint on-pack since 2019. Its best-selling Oatly Barista edition has a 58% lower climate impact than comparable cow’s milk. But publishing your climate footprint is only helpful if people have something to compare it to, so it wants the rest of the food and drink industry to do the same, giving people the information they need to make more informed choices about the environmental impact of their diets.
Objective
Our objective for this campaign was to publicise Oatly’s position on climate labelling and call for transparent labelling to become mandatory across the food and drink industry – especially dairy.
The work
Oatly applied pressure on Big Dairy with a very public incentive: a provocative OOH billboard campaign offering them free media space, if they revealed their climate footprint.
With public attention caught, we presented Oatly’s case for climate labelling in a ‘Grey Paper’ – in recognition that the issue is not black and white – titled “Climate Labelling: Why Not?”.
An AMA was run on Reddit, inviting a dairy exec to come and argue against our inarguable argument. They declined, so their place was taken instead by a mannequin, prompting much amusement online.
And we unleashed the whole integrated campaign on the media.
The results
34
Quality articles.
4 million
An informed discussion across social media, with an audience of over 4 million on LinkedIn alone.
30 million
The Reddit Ask Me Anything received more than 30 million views and more than 1000 comments.
Main objective met: Oatly was invited to join conversations with the government’s Food Data Transparency Partnership, which is exploring the issue of climate labelling.
Most importantly, we attracted the attention of ministers. Alex Sobel MP, Shadow Minister for Nature Recovery and the Domestic Environment, requested a meeting to discuss the climate labelling issue.
After the campaign, Oatly was also ranked, for the first time, as the world’s most sustainable food and drink brand in an annual survey of more than 4,000 UK consumers by market research agency Impact (vs 3rd in 2022).