According to an independent life-cycle assessment by Mérieux NutriSciences | Blonk, shelf-stable Oatly Barista oat drink has a 67% lower climate impact than chilled British cow's milk. The difference has widened from the 58% recorded in 2021. The 2026 analysis also found that operational changes had delivered environmental improvements for Oatly compared with the first assessment published in 2022.
At the end of 2025, Oatly switched its eight best-selling UK barista products to 100% British oats. According to the analysis, the company intended this move to shorten raw-material distribution distances and reduce its carbon footprint in key markets, including the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands, by 7% to 13%. In the United Kingdom, the shelf-stable drink's advantage over cow's milk in land use increased from 19% to 48%, and in water consumption from 16% to 65%. However, the widening emissions gap also resulted from changes to agricultural models that attribute a greater share of impacts to milk production, as well as newer calculations that give greater weight to methane.
