Oatly was founded in 1994 in Sweden by food scientist Rickard Öste at Lund University, based on his research into oat-based food processing. The company grew slowly for its first two decades before a global brand repositioning in the mid-2010s turned it into a lifestyle brand synonymous with sustainability-conscious dairy alternatives.
The investor table, as of the 2021 IPO and subsequent filings, tells a different story than the brand's public identity:
Oatly IPO'd on the Nasdaq in May 2021 at $17/share, initially trading above $22 and reaching a market cap exceeding $10 billion. The company's S-1 disclosed all investor relationships. The Blackstone stake generated significant controversy immediately upon IPO. The China Resources stake — nearly six times larger — generated far less mainstream press coverage, illustrating how media attention to ownership disclosure is itself selective and imperfect.
Oatly's marketing is built on a values proposition: choosing Oatly is an act of climate consciousness. The brand's packaging, advertising campaigns, and founder communications have consistently framed the purchase decision as participation in environmental progress — a statement against industrial dairy and its carbon footprint.
The Blackstone investment directly and materially undermined this proposition. Blackstone's portfolio has included investments in companies linked to deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon — the single largest contributor to biodiversity loss and carbon release in the global agricultural system. Buying oat milk to reduce your environmental impact while the brand's investors hold stakes in Amazon-linked operations is not a coherent environmental position.
Oatly's public response to the Blackstone controversy is worth reading in full, because it is unusually honest about the compromise it represents. The company argued that by accepting Blackstone money and demonstrating profitability, it was showing the PE industry that sustainability-aligned businesses could generate returns — and that this demonstration effect would encourage future PE investment in climate-positive companies.
There are no influencer-equity conflicts in the AG1 mold. The marketing misalignment here is structural — between the ownership table and the brand promise — not between paid promoters and undisclosed financial relationships.
Oatly is primarily a single retail purchase — a carton of oat milk, $5–7, no subscription. The yellow score reflects two things. First, Oatly's DTC and subscription channels, while a small share of total revenue, have grown as the brand expanded beyond grocery into direct-to-consumer formats. Second, and more substantively, the IPO context: Oatly raised capital from public markets on a values and growth narrative that has not materialized financially. The company has never reported annual net income. Revenue of ~$843M TTM is growing but accompanied by persistent net losses. The financial structure creates pressure for margin improvement that may conflict with the premium ingredient and sustainability commitments the brand markets on.
Oatly Oat Milk (Barista Edition) ingredients: Oat Base (Water, Oats), Low Erucic Acid Rapeseed Oil, Dipotassium Phosphate, Calcium Carbonate, Tricalcium Phosphate, Sea Salt, Dicalcium Phosphate, Riboflavin, Vitamin A, Vitamin D2, Vitamin B12.
The core transparency gap: oat water alone is thin, watery, and lacks the creaminess that makes oat milk a satisfying dairy substitute. Rapeseed oil is added specifically to achieve the fat content and mouthfeel that makes Oatly work as a latte. The various calcium and phosphate compounds are added for fortification (to approximate the mineral profile of dairy milk) and as emulsifiers. None of this is inherently harmful. All of it is meaningfully absent from the brand's naturalistic, minimalist visual identity and "it's like milk but made for humans" positioning.
Oatly also contains added sugars — the enzymatic processing that converts oat starches to make oat milk produces naturally occurring sugars. This is not added cane sugar, but the resulting 7g of sugar per cup is higher than unsweetened almond milk (0g) or dairy milk (12g, lactose). Oatly's Original variety markets as an everyday milk alternative without prominently communicating this sugar profile.
The yellow (not red) score reflects that the ingredient list is genuinely disclosed, nothing is concealed, and the additives serve functional purposes rather than masking inferior core ingredients. The gap is between the clean-brand aesthetic and the ingredient reality — a perception gap, not a deception in the Tropicana sense.
Oatly's sustainability claims rest on a lifecycle analysis commissioned and updated by the company itself. The original study was conducted in 2013 and updated in 2016. Activist short seller Spruce Point Capital, in a July 2021 report, alleged that the 2016 update contained less favorable findings than the 2013 version and that Oatly continued to cite the more favorable original study selectively. Oatly disputed these allegations.
On the nutrition side, Oatly's fortification approach — adding calcium, vitamin D, and B12 to approximate dairy's micronutrient profile — is scientifically sound. Whether synthetic fortification provides equivalent bioavailability to naturally occurring dairy nutrients is a contested nutritional question. Oatly markets itself as a nutritional dairy equivalent without engaging with this nuance.
No clinical trials exist on Oatly specifically. The beta-glucan in oats has established cardiovascular benefits at appropriate doses; the beta-glucan content per cup of Oatly is not published prominently, and at 0.5g or less per serving is unlikely to reach the 3g/day therapeutic threshold studied in the literature.
Oatly has faced legal challenges over specific claims in multiple markets. In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled against Oatly's "carbon footprint" claims in 2021, finding they were misleading due to narrow scope (excluding full supply chain emissions). In Sweden, the dairy industry successfully challenged several Oatly health comparison claims. In the US, multiple class action suits have been filed alleging that Oatly's "sustainability" claims are materially misleading to consumers who purchase based on environmental values.
The yellow score reflects an active, contested regulatory environment around the brand's core marketing claims — not a single clear FDA enforcement action, but a pattern of challenges across jurisdictions that suggests the brand pushes the boundaries of its evidentiary basis.
No active food safety concerns. The yellow score reflects the Spruce Point Capital report's allegation — disputed by Oatly — that the company's New Jersey manufacturing plant used 55% more water per liter of oat milk produced than its Swedish plants, and that this fact was not disclosed in the IPO prospectus. Water intensity is a core sustainability metric for a brand whose environmental credentials are its primary value proposition. Whether this constitutes material non-disclosure is a legal question that has been raised in class action litigation without resolution as of this writing.
Oatly also went through three auditors in six years prior to its IPO — a pattern noted by Spruce Point that raises governance transparency questions, though auditor changes are not themselves unusual for a growing company.