Leading Change with Sustainability as Core Business Model

Oatly’s core business model is grounded in sustainable practices. Understanding its impact through sustainability data is a huge part of Oatly’s communication to consumers and building its position as a leader in the plant-based revolution. As Oatly expands its global presence rapidly, its critical focus is scaling its sustainability work in proportion to its growth.

About Oatly

Who is Oatly?

Founded in Sweden in 1994, Oatly is a plant-based food brand with a vision to “make it easy for people to turn what they eat and drink into personal moments of healthy joy without recklessly taxing the planet’s resources in the process.” How, though? By producing dairy alternatives from oats and only oats. Since day one, Oatly has been built its core business model around
sustainable practices.

Today, its products are available in over 20 countries with an international presence in 11 locations and three production units. Oatly's two key focus areas are to constantly become more sustainable and drive society to adopt a plant-based diet. They believe this to be the way of tackling the inadequate distribution of food resources worldwide and help fight for a world where everyone is fed. To support these integrous efforts, Oatly chose Worldfavor's Sustainability Management solution to digitize and automate its global sustainability activities.

Sustainability Scope

Oatly's sustainability scope

Oatly has 11 offices worldwide and owns three production units. Beyond its internal operations, they work with 15-17 external partners. In order to comprehensively understand and minimize their negative impact, these 30 sites need to measure and report sustainability data. To do just that, there are about 4 users at each site that work in the Worldfavor platform, which amounts to about 100 people streamlining data collection in one place.

Challenge

High growth & scaling manual work

Before Worldfavor, Oatly worked manually with its sustainability data. Its sustainability team collected internal sustainability data manually with Excel sheets and sent out templates to local offices. This created a lot of manual administrative tasks for everyone involved in reporting the data, including Oatly’s Sustainability Controller, Annika Hansson.

Oatly was – and still is – growing rapidly. These manual tasks were swallowing too much time and a time-efficient solution needed to be put into place, especially considering that sustainability is part of Oatly’s core business model. These efforts needed to scale proportionally to Oatly’s growth in order to continue producing high-quality sustainable products but in a larger quantity. This meant finding a system that digitalized data collection globally and simplified quality control of the data, in order to make data-driven sustainable decisions – better for business and the planet.

Last year, Oatly conducted its first sustainability assessment and report through Worldfavor. This year, the team has spent time onboarding production partners to report on sustainability through the platform. Oatly has also been focusing on change management. During its first year reporting in Worldfavor, there was not as much data. Now, as users become accustomed to a new process, data collection becomes more accurate, more effective, and more fun – just a few of the benefits of digitalizing sustainability data. This makes it more encouraging for users to report data, which means Oatly gets its hands on more information to inform decisions, take action, and track year-on-year progress.

Oatly's Most Important Criteria

Software that makes it possible for Oatly and its partners to all collect data on a web-based and globally focused platform.

Solution

Automating analyses and change management

Since sustainability is part of Oatly’s core business model, understanding its impact through sustainability data is a huge part of its communication to consumers and building its position as a leader in the plant-based revolution. By being able to collect data globally from all offices, production sites, and partners through one digital platform, there is increased transparency and more data, providing insights that inform decision-making and communication to customers.

Moreover, in the Worldfavor platform, it’s possible to automate customized analyses from the data collected. This means Oatly doesn’t have to spend as much effort double-checking and crosschecking data manually in Excel – it’s now possible to get an overview of the data through the click of a button. This saves Annika, Oatly’s Sustainability Controller, a lot of time and makes it easier for non-technical staff to gain insights about what’s working and what isn’t, rather than getting lost in spreadsheets.