The oat milk brand is spending less overall, yet pouring its creative budget into live beverage events and turning baristas into a sales force.
Oatly is proving you can shrink the budget and get louder at the same time. The Swedish oat milk company has cut its annual selling, general and administrative expenses by $92 million from a 2022 peak, while shifting its creative firepower from wordy billboards to live “beverage events” and a barista-led playbook aimed at owning coffee culture.
Picture a New York event space this June branded “Aftertaste,” where retailers, restaurant partners, creators, and media show up not to buy oat milk, but to hear where drinks are headed next. Oatly executives called it the “Davos of beverages.” That is the new face of a company that once wrote novels on bus stops.
What Happened
Oatly has formally migrated away from analog-heavy advertising toward a digital-first, culture-shaping approach built around events and experiences. The pivot showed up in the numbers: while the company does not break out marketing spend, its SG&A expenses, which include advertising, branding, and sales teams, are down $92 million from their 2022 high.
“We have migrated from analog-heavy individual advertising to a more relevant, integrated and digital-first approach, always blended with iconic culture-making life events,” Global President and COO Daniel Ordonez told investors in April. Oatly still runs some out-of-home advertising, but the bulk of the creative spend now sits behind events and activations.
The Backstory
This all traces back to one radical hiring condition. In 2012, then-CEO Toni Petersson brought in chief creative officer John Schoolcraft, who agreed to join an oat milk company on a single term: fire the marketing department. They did exactly that.
The result is a structure most brands would find unthinkable. Oatly has no CMO and no marketing directors. Instead, four executive creative directors sit at the top of the company and weigh in on everything from product development to HR, signing off on their own work. That early bet produced the famously verbose billboards, including a bus-stop ad pitched at “normally-not-vegan-but-sometimes-flexi-veggie-person-tarians.”
The Plan
The current strategy is an evolution of Oatly’s “barista strategy.” Rather than hire salespeople, the company recruited 60 to 70 ex-baristas to embed in the coolest cafes worldwide, talking shop with other baristas and spreading oat milk by demonstration, not by pitch.
As coffee culture exploded into endless customizations, colors, and textures, with drink drops now treated like sneaker drops, Oatly started borrowing from fashion. It now publishes lookbook-style predictions on the flavors and textures it expects to trend, then stages those ideas at real-life events and amplifies the FOMO online. Crucially, its conversations with quick-service chains like McDonald’s, 7 Brew, and Dutch Bros have shifted from price and volume to strategy. Oatly now positions itself as a consultant on beverage programs, telling retailers their shelves are not built for how Gen Z shops for coffee.
The Business Model Angle
This is a classic move up the value chain: going from supplier to strategic partner. The product (oat milk) is increasingly a commodity, so Oatly is selling something harder to replicate, which is proprietary insight into where beverage culture is headed, gathered from baristas no competitor has. That insight is the moat, and it gets the company invited into the room when QSR partners design their menus.
The deeper lesson for operators is that brand and efficiency are not opposites. Oatly cut tens of millions in overhead and still reallocated its remaining creative budget toward the highest-leverage activity it could find. Spending less is not the same as caring less. The discipline is in choosing where the dollars create the sharpest brand, not in cutting until the brand goes quiet.
The Risk
Here is the honest tension. High-touch events and a 60-plus headcount of embedded baristas are expensive and hard to scale, which sits awkwardly next to a company that openly preaches efficiency and frugality. Oatly admits it cannot run big events everywhere, so it leans on digital FOMO to stretch the reach. That only works if the content actually travels.
There is also an attribution problem. “Davos of beverages” sounds great, but trade events and culture-shaping are notoriously hard to tie to revenue. Executives say they see clear signs the playbook is working, yet a strategy this dependent on taste-making lives or dies on whether it keeps moving real product through cafes and supermarket shelves.
Quick Questions
Did Oatly really fire its entire marketing department?
Yes. Back in 2012, incoming creative chief John Schoolcraft made firing the marketing team his condition for joining. Today Oatly runs with no CMO and no marketing directors, just four executive creative directors at the top.
How much did Oatly cut from its spending?
Its annual SG&A expenses, which bundle advertising, branding, and sales costs, are down $92 million from the 2022 peak. Oatly does not separately disclose pure marketing spend.
What is the “barista strategy”?
Instead of salespeople, Oatly hired 60 to 70 former baristas to hang out in top cafes worldwide, talk with other baristas, and let great oat milk lattes do the selling.
What was the Aftertaste event?
A June gathering in New York that Oatly billed as the “Davos of beverages,” bringing retailers, restaurant partners, creators, and media together to talk about the future of drinks, then amplifying it online.
The Business Model Analyst Take
The takeaway for founders is sharp: when your product becomes a commodity, sell the insight around it. Oatly stopped competing as a supplier and started showing up as a strategist, using a barista network no rival can copy as its real differentiator. And it did this while cutting $92 million in overhead, proving that brand-building and financial discipline can run on the same track. Spend less, but spend it where it builds the sharpest brand.
