Our food choices have a significant impact on the climate, with the global food system responsible for around 1/3 of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2019, Oatly became one of the first companies to include climate footprint numbers on product packaging to help consumers make more environmentally responsible purchases.

But is 0.47kg of CO2e good? We think so, but it’s hard for consumers to know without having something to compare it to. Something like the climate footprint of dairy milk. How could we help consumers understand this number?

So, we set out on a mission to create awareness of climate footprint labeling and drive a conversation on this important, but unsexy, topic.

We knew the dairy industry would never voluntarily share their climate footprint numbers, so we needed a way to apply some public pressure and challenge them to do so.

How? By making them an offer too good to refuse: free media space in exchange for their numbers.

Every touchpoint would showcase Oatly’s climate footprint numbers alongside a space for the dairy industry to freely claim, so long as they were willing to offer up their numbers as well. Now, that’s what we call a Dairy Deal!

By calling on the dairy industry to share their climate footprint numbers, we wanted to get the public wondering: “Why are climate footprint numbers important and why do some include numbers on their packaging and others don’t?”

Though the message was aimed at Big Dairy, it was mostly a creative device. For us, making sustainable food choices is in the general populations’ interest and our offline media target reflected this broad audience. On social, however, we focused on the most vocal corner of the internet, stoking the fires to increase public pressure towards policy change.

We saw an opportunity in Reddit’s environmentally passionate userbase. Redditors are 25% more likely to be concerned about the environment than the average internet user, above all other social platforms. The YoY increase of sustainability related communities and strong engagement metrics from past campaigns made Reddit an ideal partner for driving conversation on this topic.

We upped the ante beyond publicising free media with an execution designed for conversation. We offered Big Dairy executives the chance to co-host an AMA with Oatly to talk openly about their stance on climate footprint labels.

In the 10 days prior, we promoted the AMA across Reddit and Instagram; the addition of LinkedIn allowed us to target executives in the dairy industry. To show we meant business, the AMA featured our take on the classic lo-fi “proof photo”, featuring Caroline, Oatly’s Sustainability Director and a mannequin stand-in for the Big Dairy executive we were hoping would join.

While no one from Big Dairy responded, Farmer Bryce, a small-scale, organic dairy farmer – who was nearly bankrupted by Big Dairy - raised his hand. Though he wasn’t quite Big Dairy, we thought his enthusiasm for sustainable farming practices would bring a valuable perspective to the conversation. Plus, we loved his cow puns.

We started the AMA solo – Caroline handled climate-related questions and a team of community managers answered off-topic ones. An hour in, we introduced Farmer Bryce to answer any dairy-specific questions and challenge

The Dairy Deal campaign achieved 147M paid impressions across OOH, print, digital and social, as well as 19M impressions in earned media.

The Reddit execution instigated one of the largest conversations ever on climate footprint labelling, delivering 79M of those paid impressions, with the AMA itself delivering 34M.

We smashed every Reddit benchmark for a branded AMA: 154%+ higher upvote rate (meaning people liked the topic), 332% higher page scroll rate and 403% higher time spent rate (meaning people were reading the conversation), and 900% higher comment rate (meaning people were actually talking).

During the campaign period, the British government invited us to join the Food Data Transparency Partnership, a task force set up to advise the government on climate labelling. And shortly after the campaign, we were ranked as the most sustainable food and drink brand by UK consumers in an independent study by market research agency Impact.