OATLY

2022

Our plant-based family at Oatly came to us with the idea of a taste test series with a man-on-the-street vibe, to promote their new dairy-free frozen dessert bars. Oatly being Oatly, they opted for the route of absurdity: “What would you say if I told you that there’s not any tuna fish whatsoever in that frozen dessert bar?”

Travel to two US cities, give people a taste and ask them what they thought about it. Simple, right? No!

Challenge 1: It needed to feel like a multi-stop road trip, but we only had time to hit two areas. So we had to identify destinations that would give us the broadest spectrum of esoteric venues and eclectic people.

Challenge 2: Even with the best laid plan, the success rate on truly wonderful takes was going to be LOW. So we needed to fill our shoot days to the absolute brim, capturing way (way) more taste tests than a “man on the street” ever truly could.

Challenge  3: A heat wave had set its sights on our shoot window. A frozen dessert bar was the star of our show, and it would tolerate no condition other than absolutely icy coldness. Otherwise we’d be looking at a goopy, melty, opposite-of-camera-ready mess.

We cracked our knuckles and devised one hell of a road map to make this all happen.

First up was building out a robust list of location ideas that would portray the greatest distance traveled. We then found the main attractions in a given city  (i.e. a popular beach), then dug deep to discover its nuanced and obscure offerings (i.e. annual yarn festival). Each of these groupings with strong potential went on the map as a “cluster”. This foundation-laying allowed us to make a super informed decision on where to head, and in the abridgement of the decade, we settled on the Miami and Austin areas. This combo gave us the variety of people and places we were seeking, all in a frozen-dessert-bar-appropriate climate.

Then it was time to employ an ancient producing maxim: become friends with everyone.

Denise at the Giddings, Texas Chamber of Commerce: best friends forever. Larry at the Pecan Grove RV park: legend. Tina the West Palm Beach water park manager: please forgive us for taking your step ladder.

Time to figure out how to keep hundreds and hundreds of frozen dessert bars reliably ice-cold on a 100+ degree day. No matter how good your coolers are, a frozen thing is definitely going to melt if that cooler is opened every couple of minutes as we’d be doing.

Our plan: install a large chest freezer on the production cube, and use it to replenish a series of on-set and in-between coolers. Each of these coolers would be refilled from the one a step closer to the truck freezer, and each would have fewer and fewer bars in it to minimize melting. About 1,000 Oatly bars, half a dozen coolers, and a ridiculously powerful portable power battery (to run the freezer when we were on the move) were routed to each city in advance of our arrival to make this happen.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can confirm that this multi-phased, madness-harnessed plan was the best form of brilliance for this absurdity-filled but dairy-free project. We still have no idea what’s in those bars.