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How did you respond to the lawsuit from Sweden’s dairy lobby?
With total transparency. We took the lawsuit and put it on our website so that everyone could see
it. And then we ran ads in the paper that said we’re being sued by the milk industry because our sales are increasing and they find that to be extremely threatening. The moment the lawsuit came through and we chose to stand up to the milk industry,
we became a fearless company.
I think it’s relatively easy for companies to think they are courageous, but you are never really fearless until you’ve been tested. We could have analysed the situation and concluded that the risks involved in fighting back were not in our favour. But we hadn’t done anything wrong. ‘It’s like milk but made for humans’ is a 100% correct and true statement. If you run it by 100 biologists, I am pretty sure 99 of them will agree that milk is
made for baby cows. There is always one you can pay to say something else.
Being fearless is an important part of Oatly’s culture. What has that meant for decisions you’ve made?
Well, ever since I joined the company back in
2012 we haven’t employed a traditional approach. The first thing I did was to eliminate the marketing department completely. Marketing departments are a filter between the CEO and whoever is making all the creative decisions, so in my opinion they are not
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