Oatly poowers up a fully electric sampling tour
Posted by
In a powerful step towards more sustainable brand activations, Oatly has completed its first-ever electric sampling tour across the UK, delivering its signature oat-based coffee while cutting out carbon emissions.
The four-week Taste tour was created as part of Oatly’s wider Blind Taste campaign, designed to shift perceptions through first-hand product experiences. But this wasn’t your standard roadshow. Produced by creative experience agency Positive Experience and powered by clean energy pioneers AES Batteries UK, the campaign reimagined what a mobile sampling setup can be in a low-emissions future.
Over the course of three weeks, the Oatly Taste Tour travelled to Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, serving up thousands of oat lattes from a zero-emissions vehicle.
“From the start, this was about more than just oat lattes,” said Rik Haines, Managing Director at Positive Experience. “It was about rethinking how we show up in the world — and proving that sustainability, creativity, and scale can go hand in hand.”
The van itself was fully electric and fitted by Positive Experience to house a commercial-grade coffee machine and a detachable, walk-up sampling tent. The entire setup ran on AES’s EnergyHub, a mobile power solution driven by SuperPack Plus battery technology. The system supported continuous, off-grid operation, delivering energy efficient enough to power the tour’s full-day activity, including the brewing of up to 500 coffees daily, without reliance on fossil fuels.
Recharging was handled on-site via standard 240V mains or solar panels, demonstrating the viability of sustainable operations even in mobile, high-traffic environments. The approach was designed to be replicable, making this not only a proof of concept but a blueprint for how CPG brands can scale their green credentials without sacrificing experience quality or operational ease.
With brand ambassadors engaging thousands of consumers face-to-face, the tour proved that a low-impact experience can still make a high-impact impression and set a powerful tone for what the future of brand sampling could and should look like.
Stephanie Elgegren, Brand Project Manager at Oatly shared: “Taste is the one of the biggest motivations for people, particularly when it comes to breaking old habits, and we know that people love Oatly in their coffee, they just don’t know it yet. Whilst barista-crafted oat drink coffees have become a staple in the specialty coffee scenes, our blind test shows that there are still millions of people who are missing out on first-class taste experiences. With the launch of our national Taste campaign, we went on a journey with the team at Positive Experience to bring tens of thousands of barista-crafted Oatly coffees to people across the UK, proving what we know to be true, our oat drinks taste delicious. The sampling tour with Positive Experience formed an essential part of the campaign. From the production stage of bringing our fully electric, off the grid vision to life, down to the 4-week tour across the country with exceptional brand ambassadors as extensions to the brand, providing people with first-class brand and product experience.”
