So, You Sold a Part of Your Oat Milk Company to Blackstone

Or: What to Expect When You Sell Out, but Tell People You Didn’t

We’ve all been here: owners of a very successful oat milk company, riding high on incredible growth and nearly universal customer delight, only to come to what those of us in the food business call a “fork” in the road: Do we sell part of our company to Blackstone, a private equity firm that opposes almost everything we’ve spent nearly 30 years telling everyone we care about? Or do we, um, not do that?

If you’re reading this, that means you took a bunch of money from Blackstone. A curious decision! But it’s not like we don’t understand: $200 million dollars is a lot of money. 200 million is, for example, twice as much 100 million. One time I bought a month’s worth of movies for only $9.95 from a company called MoviePass, so I know firsthand how tough it is to pass up a good deal (even when it feels sketch).

From here the obvious question for this newly-enriched oat milk brand becomes: how to break the news to our fans? If you’re reading this, that means you decided the best course of action was to tell your customers that selling to Blackstone is “all a part of the plan, baby!” (My paraphrase.) And here’s where we come to the “meat” (or should I say “oat”) of the issue. I’ll break it down in six tidy points, one for each day of the week except one of them.

1. Oat milk drinkers are not babies.

We understand your confusion. Drinkers of milk often are babies. But, conversely, we are not. And as non-baby adults, we’ve become attuned to some of the complexities of the world. For example, did you know that a good company can do something not good, but expend a lot of energy and write a bunch of words trying to convince you it is, in fact, good? This is something we found out about called “marketing.”

2. There is a global pandemic.

Have you checked the papers and magazines? There is a global pandemic. One outcome of these unprecedented times is that simple oat milk drinkers like ourselves are starting to wake up to many of the world’s injustices — including just how reliably wealthy people do not care about the rest of us. One example of someone who could care less about the little guys — practically picked out of a hat, so my apologies if it feels totally random — is the Trump-supporting CEO of Blackstone. Call me crazy, but in a time of widespread economic insecurity among the middle and lower classes… I would actually like to take money away from the rich boys? Instead of learning that they now skim a percent off the top of even my creamy oat milk purchase?

3. Speaking of, did you know that we know that Blackstone can spend the money it makes from our Oatly purchases on whatever it wants?

Even Bad Stuff™?

4. What do the cows have to say?

Once the “belles of the ball,” milk-wise, have our bovine companions been relegated to also-rans? Why do we so infrequently consider the feelings of the oft-spotted superstar? If an undesired udder squirts milk in the woods, does anyone hear it — much less grab a pail and start squeezing? This is the traditional “joke portion” of this essay, and while it may not be funny it is certainly taking up one of my six bullet points. In truth, nobody cares what the cows have to say because the cows speak only cow language, which does not have a direct translation to English and is essentially garbage.

5. Does Oatly need to grow to solve the climate crisis?

“The best way to save the planet is to replace every single quart of dairy with Oatly brand oat milk!” This is a good argument if you’re an oat milk company named Oatly that’s trying to make money. But it’s only a medium argument if you are trying to make the world better. A lot of why we’re in our current predicament (what scientists are calling “everything’s fucked”) is due to the unrestrained growth of companies with slick and slippery morals. These companies skate by on echoes of the revolutionary dreams they held when they were small and idealistic — the ones that got them their fans! — telling us they’re still the nicest boys in the choir, when in truth they’ve grown into monsters. Maybe you have heard of Facebook. The truly radical argument might be, “one nice way to save the planet is by consuming less.” But that doesn’t sell oats.

6. Isn’t this sort of a “me” thing?

A twist! Is our hero (me, I’m the hero) having second thoughts? If I agree that oat milk is better for the planet than dairy — and I do — then what the heck is my problem, young man?

OK, you got me. My feet are stuck deep in your gooey oat mulch and I can’t escape. As it turns out, this whole darn essay may in fact be a bit of a “me” thing. You see, I’ve spent the last little while feeling like a bit of a hero with every Oatly purchase. I read the cartons with delight, I laughed at the jokes, I added a nickel to my mental piggybank (oatybank?) each time I poured a glass. “I am a good boy who is saving the planet,” I thought, “by purchasing this creamy treat made of oats and rapeseed oil.”

But the spell has been broken. It turns out things are complex. For example, sometimes in life you get convinced by delightful marketing that you’re saving the planet by buying Oatly — but then the summer of 2020 happens, and a nefarious company starts to profit off of each Oatly purchase, and you realize that, “no, I am just buying oat milk, I’m not some kind of environmental hero, and the implications of this purchase and probably every purchase are complex, because some nice people and also some bad people are making money off of me, which is both good and bad, and in any case not as straightforward as some clever post I read on my favorite oat milk company’s web blog.”

From here, the marketing is seen as basically just marketing. The oat milk is seen as essentially just oat milk. The saving-the-world is revealed to be something more difficult than just buying different, greener shit.

At the end of the day, and (moreseo) at the beginning of the day, and (infrequently) in the middle portion of the day, I like Oatly. I prefer oat milk to dairy, both in taste and environmental impact. I’ll continue to buy Oatly oat milk, or Chobani, or whatever’s on sale — and I’ll root for any company that’s better than what came before it. Oatly is this and for it I root. But my milk purchase is not going to save the world, and you can’t convince me that it is, god damn it!