I stood in front of the oat milk at the New Seasons on Division for longer than a functional adult should stand in front of oat milk. Not because I was deciding. Because the carton was talking to me.
It said it was like milk, but made for humans. Then, in smaller type down the side panel, it admitted that a person had been hired to write that side panel, wondered aloud whether anyone ever reads side panels, and concluded that if I was still here, hello.
I bought two. I do not especially like oat milk.
Oatly writes like a person who knows they are on a carton, and that one piece of self-awareness is doing more work than any amount of clean design ever could.
Walk the same cooler and look at what it is up against. A serif wordmark and an almond in a soft-focus field. A watercolor cow. Nourish, simply, journey, arranged in the order those words always appear. Every one of those packages was approved by a room that agreed nothing on the carton should be capable of offending anyone. They achieved it. Nothing on the carton is capable of anything at all.
Here is where people go wrong copying this. The voice is not the jokes. I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where a client sees Oatly, asks for something wittier, and gets back a deck of puns two weeks later. Puns are not a voice. Oatly is funny because it holds a position, which is that the dairy industry's claim on the word milk is faintly ridiculous, and every line on that package runs downstream of the position.
Take the position away and the copy dies on contact. That is the test worth stealing. If your brand voice would collapse the moment a competitor used the same jokes, you do not have a voice. You have a font and a mood.
If your brand voice would collapse the moment a competitor used the same jokes, you do not have a voice.
The other thing Oatly understands is that it is allowed to be annoying. Plenty of people find that carton insufferable, smug, too pleased with itself. That is not a flaw the team failed to catch. It is the cost of being legible from six feet away in a cooler full of watercolor cows. Neutral is not safe. Neutral is invisible, and invisible is the only real failure mode in a grocery aisle.
I sing karaoke twice a month at a bar in Southeast with a floor that holds onto your shoes, where the host calls everybody baby and means it. I am not good. I am extremely committed, which is a different thing, and it is the only reason anyone claps. Oatly is committed. The rest of the aisle is merely competent.