Oatly Launches Vegan Ice Cream Range In The US

NEW YORK, United States — Swedish oat-based F&B brand Oatly has launched a range of vegan ice-cream in the US, as it vows to put oat-milk shortages of the past behind it.

Seven Oatly ice cream flavours are currently being stocked in select bodegas across New York City, with retailers including Whole Foods and Target also set to sell the range over the coming months.

“We saw a really big gap in the plant-based or vegan frozen set in the ability to execute classics or staples in a really high-quality way,” Oatly general manager Mike Messersmith told NOSH.

“There are a lot of plant-based items that have elaborate ingredient structures with peanut butter and flavours and crazy mix-ins, which is a big subset of the ice cream category, but our approach was ‘let’s try to do the classics but no dairy, no nuts no soy, non-GMO way,” he added.

According to Oatly, the range swaps traditional dairy ingredients for plant-based alternatives and uses paper packaging to “reduce this product’s already low climate impact by another 79%,” with each tub priced at $5.99.

Having run into trouble last year, following the much-publicised shortages of its popular oat-milk, Oatly is keen to ensure it can keep up with demand this time around, so it’s also doubling down on production with a new factory in New Jersey. This it says, will help increase volume as much as tenfold.

The brand is also said to be considering the UK for another factory, having generated £18 million in revenue in the country last year — a figure it expects to more than double this year.

And as Oatly continues to experience rapid growth around the globe, thanks to the rise in vegan and conscious consumers who are switching to more plant-based products, Oatly could eventually go public if it continues to grow, its chief executive Toni Petersson told Yahoo recently.

“We’re tapping into this whole global movement, this ideology of making this world better,” Petersson told Yahoo.

“It is driven by young people who are concerned about what’s going on and understand that everybody needs to pitch in in order to make things better — a movement that has grown really, really strong in the last two years” he added