People are easily bored, so if someone writes something unexpected it tends to make people feel good. When we got things printed and people are sitting holding the packs, those same people told me how excited and proud they were. The funny thing is those were sketches projected onto the wall. Someone stood up and said this was the worst, most childish packaging they had ever seen and asked me why I was ruining this company. People can react quite negatively to change, and for some of them, this just threatened their entire existence. I remember Toni called the whole company together for a meeting, and we unveiled the new packaging. We know that once we’re in people’s hands, they read the copy, try us, and tend, in great numbers, to like the taste. The legal side on the back we refer to as the boring side. We thought that every side of the packaging there should be something interesting to read. There are so many conventions. The aim was to get customers to pick it up out of curiosity so we intentionally made these look like we’d just made these in the basement at home. If you look at the dairy alternative packaging on shelves the liquid is always shown, it usually pours from the right hand side, everything is colour coded to a pattern that exists in the design world. Brands will make slight tweaks so customers don’t get confused and the result is no one notices. We approached it differently, we just threw the old packaging out completely and were prepared to take the hit.
Usually, in the food industry, any change whatsoever made to the packaging would make the company very nervous that sales would dip. It’s owned media and because we don’t have these US or UK size advertising budgets it’s really our main media.
Once decided on the new strategy, what was the first change you made? So it really became about Oatly contributing to a plant based society, or for us to at least encourage steps in that direction. I grew up in the US where meat is part of every meal. Then when you work here, you see all the numbers, and the statistics, and the scientific reports, and you realise that animal-based eating is killing the planet and killing people. We knew we needed to do more than just sell a product, we needed to have a far bigger visionary ambition. We recognised that if people drink our products, they’re doing something good for themselves in terms of their health but also for the planet in terms of the carbon emissions and land usage from production. As in lots of conceptual development, we initially looked at the origins and roots of the brand.