Oatly wins China one café at a time — 'Three Ones' turns baristas into its channel

In 2018 Oatly entered China with no category and no recognition. Consumers saw oat milk as another soy drink, and retail placement was a dead end: the team's first supermarket listing sold two or three cartons a day, and nobody could even say whether the product belonged in the drinks, dairy or soy-milk aisle.

David Zhang, then head of the region, flipped the playbook. Instead of pushing into more stores, Oatly concentrated on one city (Shanghai), one market (specialty cafés) and one product (the Barista edition built for steaming). The team launched in about ten boutique cafés and then worked door to door, showing baristas how the milk textured and poured in a latte.

The cafés became the media. Oatly encouraged them to put 'oat latte' on their boards at a slight premium, which turned the unfamiliar product into a curiosity. The chain reaction was fast: a few cafés in the first month, hundreds within months, thousands by the end of 2018 — and by 2023 enough product had been sold in China to make roughly one billion oat lattes.

The same logic built the category online: Oatly proposed a new 'plant protein' category on Tmall, and on Singles' Day 2018 the new category's promotion sold out 5,000 cartons in 11 minutes. Café credibility later unlocked chains — Starbucks mainland China signed in 2020 — and a local factory followed in 2021.