You might have noticed - we’ve changed bottles. We know, some of you are going to be heartbroken. Drinking oat milk out of a wine bottle is just so darn classy. They’re also really good for the planet, so let’s start off by telling you the good we’ve been able to do with them so far.
- We’re proud to say, we’ve repurposed more than 6 000 wine bottles headed for recycling centers and used them to deliver 25 000 litres of our oat milk.
- Re-using these bottles eliminated the recycling process they were about to go through. This process requires glass to be transported, broken, cleaned, turned into molten liquid and then reformed. We love recycling (and recommend it wholeheartedly - recycling two glass bottles saves the equivalent energy of boiling water for five cups of tea.), but our little interception saved even more.
- Our sustainable ethos seems to have already rubbed off on many of our partners, cafes and restaurants who stock us. We have been able to show them and support them in their own sustainable journey to reuse and recycle.
Our wine bottles have allowed us to do so much good and they’ve been the perfect place for us to start. So... why the change?
GOOD BY YOU, GOOD BY OUR PLANET
As we keep telling you, there are two things we’ll never compromise on:
- Doing good by you
- Doing good by our planet
The move to our new curvy, sumptuous glass bottles are motivated by exactly that.
Fresher For Longer
Our oat milk now has a 30-day shelf life all the while still being preservative-, additive- and gum-free. How? Small changes in some technical details that come with the new bottle:
- Thermal Shock: our new bottles have an incredibly high temperature tolerance, meaning we can fill them at really, really hot temperatures - a process known as hot-filling. Filling directly with hot milk sterilises our bottles and kills off any trace of bacteria which may still have been present even after our rigorous cleaning processes.
- Vacuum Seal: our new bottle comes with a new lid which vacuum seals when the oat milk inside the bottle begins to cool. This keeps out any nasty foreign bacteria.
Reusable Caps
Our new caps can be reused 8 times over before they lose their sealing ability. Before? While our lids were made from aluminium and thus easily recycled - they could be used just once.
Stronger Bottles
While we loved our wine bottles, they tended to break, shatter and cause some mess (and food wastage) during the various stages of production, delivery and retail. Our new, stronger bottles eliminate much of that risk and structurally last twice as long as our wine bottles.
Efficient Production
With our new bottles being a uniform size, our production process is going to be much, much faster. Our cleaning is more efficient too. Both these things save us a lot of time! Saved time means we can expand our production, impacting more lives as more people make the switch to our locally produced oat milk. Costs come down, we grow faster and the fly-wheel continues. Our oat milk becomes cheaper and more accessible - growing the pool of people who can now save the world one oat milk latte at a time.
Saving Water
Cleaning also becomes simpler - we use fewer chemicals and less water to sterilise our new curvy bottles. It took about 2 litres to wash each wine bottle (soaking old labels off, chemical sterilization, rinsing, etc), we’ve more than halved that with the introduction of our new glass bottles.
All these benefits mean that our overall carbon footprint is lowered which is really good for the planet. Less water, more efficient production, reduced food waste and more reusable aspects all contribute to a lowered carbon footprint and impact on our planet.
Finally...
We promise we’ve done the work - we’ve read the papers, drawn up the excel sheets, done the calculations and these bottles are the way forward. For us to grow as sustainably as possible this is what we’ve got to do. It’s a sad good-bye to our beautiful wine bottles, but it’s a happy hello to our new curvy ones. Out with the old, in with the new - changes for the sake of building a sustainable future.