A recipe campaign that argues by fashion rather than by category
Oatly releases the Spring/Summer 2026 edition of its Look Book at the London Coffee Festival, held in the Old Truman Brewery from 14 to 17 May 2026. The release is the third instalment of a programme that the Swedish plant-based brand launched in May 2025 with a Spring/Summer 2025 edition and continued in autumn 2025 with the Autumn/Winter 2025/26 volume. The Look Book is positioned not as a recipe leaflet, the format the dairy and coffee categories have used for decades, but as a seasonal collection presented with the visual grammar of a fashion lookbook.
The Spring/Summer 2026 collection is described by Oatly as Latin American in inspiration. The featured drinks include a tortilla and agave latte, a fig leaf matcha, a mate cola latte, a clarified hojicha Old Fashioned, an oat tepache, and a matcha Jell-Oat shot. The recipes are developed by an in-house team led by Toby Weedon, the company's barista development director, and Rowena Roos, its head of food and drinks experience. The team is supported by 60 barista market development managers based in coffee shops across Oatly's main markets, who supply the trend signals and ingredient experiments the central team turns into a coherent seasonal narrative.
The strategic problem the Look Book answers
Oatly is operating in a category that has matured rapidly. Plant-based milk is no longer a fringe choice. Specialty coffee shops in most European and North American cities now offer at least one oat option as a default. The challenger argument that defined Oatly's communication in the mid-2010s, the case for switching away from cow's milk, has therefore become harder to lead with, because the audience the brand most wanted to reach has already switched. The next problem the brand faces is one of cultural relevance rather than category education. The question is no longer whether the audience will try oat milk. The question is which oat brand the audience will commit to.
The Look Book is a direct answer to that question. By framing the brand's annual recipe development as a seasonal collection rather than as a marketing utility, Oatly moves the conversation away from product comparison and toward cultural participation. The fashion lookbook is a familiar reference for the Gen Z and millennial audience the brand wants to retain. The grammar carries an implicit claim, that the brand belongs in the same conversation as the seasonal collections the audience already follows, and that an oat drink can be treated with the same editorial seriousness as a piece of seasonal clothing.
The format and the visual logic
Each edition of the Look Book follows the same structural pattern. A minimalist split-screen layout sits at the heart of the design system, with the drink photographed on one side and the recipe and ingredient credit on the other. The photography is unfussy and high-resolution, with strong colour separation between the drink, the glassware, and the background, in a register closer to a fashion editorial than to a food magazine spread. The naming of the drinks is deliberate. A drink is not described by its functional ingredients alone, the way a coffee shop menu would describe it, but is given a title that reads as a small piece of cultural reference, salty banana split, lacto-fermented blueberry matcha, gochujang hot chocolate, clarified hojicha Old Fashioned, matcha Jell-Oat shot.
The result is a publication that does the work of a campaign without occupying the slots a campaign usually occupies. Out-of-home advertising remains in the brand's mix, with the The Drum reporting in March 2025 on the brand's out-of-home work around blind taste test results. The Look Book sits alongside those campaigns as a content asset that the audience comes to rather than one that the brand pushes to the audience. The recipes live on the brand's own website at oatly.com, are extended through social channels, and are activated through hospitality partnerships at events such as the London Coffee Festival and Milan Fashion Week.
The festival and fashion week activations
The London Coffee Festival serves as the primary launch moment for each edition. Oatly stages an On the Rocks Coffee shop pop-up that serves drinks from the new Look Book, with the festival functioning as a four-day soft launch for the speciality coffee trade audience before the recipes reach the wider consumer base. The festival platform is well chosen. It places the new collection in front of the baristas who will translate the recipes into menus over the following months, and it gives the brand a venue in which the audience tastes the work rather than only reads about it.
The fashion connection is reinforced by the brand's partnership with the Italian label AVAVAV during Milan Fashion Week. AVAVAV serves Oatly-based drinks at its runway shows, and the partnership extends the Oat Couture metaphor into a literal fashion-week setting. Oatly is therefore not making a fashion claim from a distance. The brand is showing up inside the fashion week calendar, with named designer partners, in a way that closes the loop between metaphor and venue.
What the programme continues to model
The Look Book is a useful reference for any food and beverage brand operating in a maturing category. It demonstrates that a brand can earn cultural participation by adopting the format of an adjacent industry rather than by amplifying its own category vocabulary. It also shows the value of internal capability over external commissioning. The recipes are developed in-house by the team that already trains baristas, which keeps the seasonal collection grounded in the daily practice of the trade rather than in a separate marketing department. With three editions released in twelve months, the Look Book has moved from a single creative idea to a repeatable platform, and Oatly has secured a calendar slot of its own inside the fashion-week year.
