UK Oatly adverts banned for “misleading” planetary and health claims

26 Jan 2022 --- The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned two television advertisements, a paid Facebook post, a paid Twitter post and two press ads from the Swedish oat drink company Oatly. 

The ASA received 109 complaints about potentially misleading claims in Oatly’s ads. One of the complaints was lodged by A Greener World.

The claims in question are: 

Oatly generates 73% less CO2 than milk.

The dairy and meat industries emit more CO2 than all the world’s planes, trains, cars and boats combined.

More than 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are generated by the food industry, and meat and dairy account for more than half of that.

Climate experts say cutting dairy and meat products from our diets is the single biggest lifestyle change we can make to reduce our environmental impact.

If everyone in the world adopted a vegan diet, it would reduce food’s annual greenhouse emissions by 6.6 billion metric tons, a 49% reduction.

Beverage company defends positionOatly produces alternative dairy products.
Oatly had commissioned CarbonCloud, an independent product life cycle assessment expert, to calculate the emissions of its Barista Edition oat drink and British whole cow’s milk. 

CarbonCloud used an attributional approach to lifecycle accounting in the emissions calculation. It did not take into account avoided emissions, which are actions taken to mitigate released emission or carbon offsetting. 

Oatly Barista’s climate footprint was calculated to be 0.44 kg carbon dioxide per kg and included the emissions from agricultural production of oats, rapeseed, processing ingredients, transport of ingredients, energy consumption in the factory, packaging and distribution.

In 2021, the company unveiled plans for one of the world’s largest plant-based dairy factories to be based in the UK and is expected to produce 300 million liters of oat milk per year, rising to 450 million liters annually. Its initial public offering (IPO) trades at US$17 on Nasdaq.

Oatly bolstered its plant-based movement through an agreement to invest US$200 million in equity led by Blackstone Growth. Celebrity investors in the funding round include Oprah Winfrey, Jay Z and Natalie Portman. 

Decision to ban
Despite Oatly laying all the facts on the table and providing explanations for the claims, ASA states that it expected to see evidence relating to the CO2 produced for Oatly products and types of cow’s milk.

“We had only seen evidence for the CO2 emissions generated in the production of Oatly Barista Edition oat drink and whole cow’s milk,” the standards authority says.

“While we acknowledged that they would amend the claim to say which products had been included in the analysis, we concluded that because the evidence was not sufficient to support the claim as consumers would understand it, were misleading.”

ASA concluded that because the claims would be understood by consumers as based on equivalent and full life cycle analyses when that was not the case.

By Inga de Jong