Oatly’s Climate Comeback: The Oat Milk Giant’s Deep Dive into Sustainability

Courtesy: Oatly

If oat milk had a manifesto, Oatly just published it. And it’s not just another glossy sustainability brochure full of buzzwords and vague commitments. The company’s new “Sustainability Plan: The Deep Dive” reads more like a roadmap for radical accountability—one that invites scrutiny, challenges business-as-usual, and dares other plant-based pioneers to up their game.

The document is long, dense, and strikingly self-aware. It opens not with celebration but with a call to action rooted in planetary urgency: industrial food systems are failing us. While many brands hang their sustainability hats on better packaging or one-off carbon-neutral claims, Oatly is staking its identity on system-level transformation.

At its core, Oatly’s plan recognizes the paradox of scaling a climate-conscious brand within a capitalist food economy that still rewards low prices over low emissions. Rather than gloss over this contradiction, the company leans in—with plans to shrink its footprint, rethink its role in land use, and transform its supply chain to be more regenerative and just.

Carbon Metrics with Teeth

A key pillar of the plan is Oatly’s adoption of an “intensity target” approach for emissions. Instead of only counting total emissions, Oatly measures grams of CO₂ equivalent per kilogram of product sold—a metric that incentivizes decarbonization even as the company grows. That’s rare in the food industry, where absolute emissions often rise with scale and where transparency is usually limited to product-level carbon labels. Oatly goes further, offering Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs) of its entire product line, with updates planned for each market.

The company also openly acknowledges its current weaknesses. Its biggest emission source? Ingredients. Especially oats and rapeseed oil. Rather than outsourcing the problem, Oatly is exploring innovative sourcing strategies, including regenerative farming pilots and closer farmer partnerships, aiming to align production with biodiversity, soil health, and climate outcomes.

Land Use, Equity, and the Global North Dilemma

Oatly’s plan doesn’t just tackle carbon—it also raises hard questions about land use, food justice, and the outsized consumption habits of the Global North. The company calls out the inefficiencies of animal agriculture and makes the case for plant-based products as a more efficient, lower-impact alternative. But it doesn’t stop there. It also wrestles with the ethical complexity of operating within a global food system that often exploits land and labor in the Global South to meet the desires of Northern consumers.

That’s why part of Oatly’s vision includes embracing landscape-level solutions that integrate equity, environmental stewardship, and long-term farmer resilience. It’s looking to initiatives like EcoAct’s frameworks and ISEAL’s core criteria for landscape integrity to guide its next steps.

Financial Performance Amid Sustainability Ambitions

The release of the sustainability plan also comes at a time of cautious optimism for Oatly’s business fundamentals. In its Q1 2025 earnings report, the company posted revenues of $197.5 million—essentially flat year-over-year, but a 0.7% increase when adjusted for currency effects. More importantly, gross profit improved to $62.3 million (up from $53.9 million the previous year), and the gross margin rose to 31.6%. The company also significantly narrowed its net loss to $12.4 million, a $33.4 million improvement from the same quarter in 2024.

While profitability remains elusive, the narrowing losses signal a tightening operation—potentially fueled by both supply chain efficiencies and the early financial returns of its climate-aligned strategies. For a brand positioning itself as a sustainability vanguard, proving that environmental integrity and financial discipline can coexist is a narrative with weight.

Health, Not Just Hype

Nutritional sustainability is another cornerstone of the plan. Oatly wants to reframe health not as a marketing claim but as part of its planetary responsibility. The brand advocates for a food system shift that aligns with global dietary guidelines like those from the WHO and national food agencies, emphasizing whole grains and fiber-rich plant foods over ultra-processed fare.

This ambition plays into Oatly’s ongoing debates about fortification, sugar content, and labeling. Rather than sidestepping criticism, the company uses the plan to clarify its evolving strategy, including efforts to make nutritional information more transparent and relevant across markets.

A Work in Progress—and Proud of It

One of the most striking aspects of Oatly’s plan is its tone. The document reads more like an open-source blueprint than a corporate pat on the back. It’s laced with citations from climate science, links to global research (from the IPCC to The Lancet), and repeated invitations for feedback and collaboration.

Oatly doesn’t pretend to have it all figured out. It admits where its data is incomplete, where progress is slow, and where its intentions outpace its infrastructure. But in doing so, it builds something rare in corporate sustainability: trust.

The Bigger Picture: Beyond Oatly

Why does this matter beyond just one oat milk company? Because Oatly is one of the few plant-based brands that has reached global scale—and it’s using that position not to ride the green consumer wave but to challenge the very system it profits from.

Whether it’s enough is still up for debate. Critics may point out that Oatly is still a packaged product shipped globally. But in an era where too many companies use sustainability to greenwash status quo operations, Oatly’s willingness to air its internal conflicts—and publish a 20-page plan that reads like a climate think tank report—is a bold move.

It’s also a challenge to the rest of the industry. If oat milk can take on food systems thinking, why not energy bars, protein shakes, and ready meals?

In the end, Oatly’s sustainability plan is less a declaration of success than an invitation to join a difficult, necessary journey. One that may not have a perfect map—but finally, someone’s bothering to draw one.