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This might come as a shock, but we don’t know everything about oats here at Oatly.
As it turns out, making oat drink all day is incredibly time-consuming, and the relentless oat-related news cycle can be very hard to keep up with. Still, we should’ve known more about the World Porridge Making Championship that happens every year in the Scottish Highlands. For one, it’s called the Golden Spurtle, which is a funny name. We like funny names. Plus, the competition has been around as long as Oatly - about 30 years, give or take - making us kindred spirits in some respect.
But none of that matters when you consider one very simple question: “What is porridge?” Well, it’s hot, comes in a bowl, and is made of … oats. Oats are the main ingredient, actually - and there’s no close second. You can say water, but that’s in everything. Same with salt. Basically, Oatly has zero excuse for not having visited the Golden Spurtle at some point over the last three decades to enjoy the company of other oat-happy oddballs and to eat tons of porridge.
We made up for it this year, though. Not only did we visit the competition itself to soak in the intense highs and lows of cooking porridge in front of a very polite, mild-mannered crowd of Scots on a gloomy October afternoon, we also expanded out to the gorgeous surrounding areas of the Scottish Highlands (a distillery, a bus stop, a pub).
In the end, we felt it was our duty to understand what makes Scots tick when it comes to their porridge - and to see if Oatly meets their standards for an oat-based concoction that is decidedly not porridge.