We will drive a food system shift

The way food production is modelled globally today threatens communities, the climate and ecosystem resilience. If we are to realize the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (a.k.a. the UN SDGs) and the international Paris Agreement on Climate Change, we need to transform the global food system, like, right now. In this section you can find out more about our work in 2021 together with farmers, scientists and other partners to drive a shift toward more sustainable, low-emission practices in the areas at the core of our business: oats, our suppliers and packaging.

To support the global food system shift, we aspire to create a food system that will give back to nature and communities, by 2029, where we source by restoring carbon, improving biodiversity and boosting farmers’ income.

Learn more about the ambition in Ashley's to do list here.

Building from our partnerships with farmers in Sweden and the U.S, in 2021, we began developing an Oatly approach to restorative and regenerative agriculture for oats that works toward reducing and removing GHG emissions, increasing ecosystem function, and building farm viability and resilience. We are also developing an internal Oatly sustainable sourcing protocol for oats that we believe in future years will help us drive consistency in our farm partnership approach across the regions from which we source and feed data, results, experience and learning into a common knowledge bank.

We have refined and expanded our partnership with oat farmers in Sweden. We have also worked with an agronomist to develop a list of sustainable farm management practices and tested them with 11 volunteer farmers. Using this learning, we are refining our list of management practices and recruiting more farmers, with the goal of transporting greater volumes of more sustainable oats to our partner mill.

In 2021, Oatly continued into the third year of our “U.S. Oats for Oatly” program with 15 Midwest U.S. farmers and NGO partners to test the environmental and economic benefits of growing oats in rotation with the more-commonly grown corn and soy. We believe that if we can prove these benefits, we’ll help a wider community of American farmers incorporate oats into their crop rotations, improving soil health, water quality and biodiversity and diversifying farmers’ income opportunities and expanding the supply of food-grade, U.S.-grown oats. We’re continuing to gather data from these partner farms to evaluate the impact oats and cover cropping have had on each farm, and will share preliminary lessons and results in 2022.

In 2021, our packaging accounted for about 10% of our corporate climate footprint, approximately 0.007 kg CO2e per produced liter, which is an 11% increase per produced liter compared to 2020. We believe this increase is primarily due to both our ability to gather more data and a weight-increase for some of our packaging.

For packaging, the raw materials – where they come from and how much is used – are important elements of climate impact. While our packaging use continued to grow because of more products produced, we maintained our share of 87% renewable or recycled packaging materials. Of the materials used, 45% was recycled material.

We will work to increase the proportion of renewable and recycled packaging materials. We also plan to further define targets related to packaging made with renewable energy and end-use recycling.