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Oat Cult’s Warning to CPG: Don’t Let the Functional Trap Flatten Your Brand

Why does health and wellness have to be so dry? Why do so many functional food brands mistake ingredients for ideas? And why, when every brand has a benefit to shout about, do so few have anything memorable to say? Those are some of the questions behind Oat Cult, the overnight oats brand containing 1 billion live cultures, with a cult following to match. Built around a deliberately odd brand world, and rooted in the weirdness of British folklore rather than the soft, familiar codes of modern wellness, Oat Cult is challenging the assumption that healthy brands have to look healthy. eatbigfish’s Jono Wylie spoke to co-founder and former advertising creative director Ben Da Costa about building a brand first on a spreadsheet, using constraints as creative fuel, resisting the race to functionality, and why anyone can make overnight oats, but there is only one Oat Cult.

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What exactly is Oat Cult challenging? Not necessarily who, but what assumption or category norm are you fighting against?

Multiple things. I guess there’s my own sense of what a brand can be and what you can say and what you can do. That is a huge part of what drives Oat Cult as a challenger.

But I think we looked at a category that was established in terms of oats. People didn’t need convincing. Other brands have done years of educating in terms of the space. But the category is boring as shit, basically. Why does health and wellness have to be really dry? Why can’t it behave in a different way?

I think we are challenging the preconception that wellness needs to be yoga, wholesome family meal bowls, beautiful sunlight and that whole world. People understand what healthy means, and they will make their own decisions. So we are challenging a category that already exists, challenging the tropes of that category, and doing the complete opposite to everyone else.

Why can’t wellness be cool?

Some people might squint at Oat Cult and say it feels a bit like Liquid Death. What are they seeing, and what are they missing?

Obviously I was inspired by Liquid Death in that the person who set the business up is a creative. He was an advertising and marketing creative, like myself, and I found that inspirational in terms of it being possible to do that.

But if you get into the nitty gritty, the brands are very different. Liquid Death has a punk, thrash metal, rock and roll type feel. Ours borrows from old English folk tradition in the UK.

For us, I was really inspired by cults in the UK. You go to some random village in the middle of nowhere, and there are weird traditions and oddness of Britishness that I don’t think is really being brought to light yet. There is so much oddness in the UK. We portray ourselves as very straight, but actually there is a lot of weirdness and a lot of rich history.

So yes, there is a similarity people might spot, but for me that is about as far as it goes. We are playing in a culture of British traditional fonts and types and look, and then bringing modernity with the colour palette.

The inspiration is the refusal to play by the rules of the category. But you still have to have a unique brand story that makes sense for you. And also, we have a bit more NPD in terms of what we have created. We are not just taking plain oats and putting them in a different pack. There is more to it than that.

**We often say a brand for everyone is a brand for no one. Who is Oat Cult not for?**

I think it is self-selecting. I don’t think there is a demographic type. We just don’t take ourselves very seriously, and I think we appeal to people who have that similar feeling.

There are people who buy the brand in a shop, purchase the product, eat it, and do not even know we have an Instagram with oats milking themselves into bowls and all that mad stuff. But direct to consumer is a huge part of what people buy into. They buy into the brand and our ethos of being a bit punk and not really caring. We just do what we think is fun.

Social has been really freeing. We set ourselves the challenge of creating something every day. As a creative, that is quite difficult, but it is liberating. We do not get it right all the time. We are testing and trying.

I do not think we say we are not for anyone. We just let people self-select. We are not trying to shock or offend. That is not the spirit of the brand. I don’t care what people think, but I do not want to deliberately offend people either.

My whole ethos as a creative has always been about distinctiveness. Be seen. That is the art of marketing: be noticed. But not by shock. We are not creating something because it will really piss someone off.

You come from a creative background. What advantage did that give you when building Oat Cult? And any disadvantages?

As a creative, the fun bit has always been the brand building. The creation of the brand, the brand world, how it looks, what the name is. All those things are super fun.

But I knew that unless the business was there and it made sense, it would just be a fun passion project. Being an older founder with a family, I did not want to invest loads of time in that. This had to be an incredible business for me.

So I built the business basically on a spreadsheet, on paper: all the margins, all the boring forecasting. We made three-year forecasts from the start and did all the most tedious stuff to make sure there was a real, legitimate business there.

Then, once we knew that it could work, the brand was the dessert at the end. Cool, now we get to do it because, on paper, this is a credible business.

A lot of creative people jump straight into the bit they know how to do. They show me the logo, and I think, where is your gross margin? Have you got the evidence? You need to make sure you can look at yourself in the mirror and know that you can commit the next five to ten years of your life to something, and that it is going to be worth your while.

Did your creative training give you a more instinctive understanding of culture rather than just product features?

I say this to you as a brand strategy expert interviewing me, but we did not write that down. That is all just intuitive. But that is nearly 20 years of doing it for other big brands. A lot of it is just in my head, in terms of what we do and what is right and what is not right.

Over time, leading creative departments, I built rules and frameworks for how I judge creativity. When you have creatives working with you, it is important to say: this is how I judge work, this is what I expect. I just applied that to myself when we were creating the business.

I just thought, this will be fun. We can have fun with this. I did not know exactly where it would go, but I knew intuitively that this would be cool.

Were there any ways in which ‘agency Ben’ and ‘founder Ben’ disagreed with each other?

There are lots of times where I would love to spend more money on things, or do more marketing. But fundamentally, running the P&L, I know we cannot afford it.

There is a moment where I have to talk to myself and say: as exciting as that is, it will not help the business at the moment. So you put it on the back burner.

Things like new products and other fun stuff would be really fun to do. But we resist the urge.

Challengers are often forced into creativity because they do not have the luxury of big budgets. What constraints have made Oat Cult better?

The pack is exactly 15 centimetres across, and that is because, for our co-manufacturer, that was the smallest they could make the machine to fill single serves. They had never done that before.

So the reason the pack is the oversize square shape is because that was the smallest it could be. We could have paid for tooling to change the machine, but it would have been more than we raised in cash. So we just said: “f*** it, we will make it the size that it is”.

And it became a distinctive brand asset. To the manufacturer, it was the smallest they could do. But to other people, it looks like a very large and generous single-serve pouch.

Even the box we send the product out in was something we needed for retail and DTC. We could not afford to print multiple boxes, so we made sure the box could work for both. It could be posted and shipped to customers as a product box, and also work on shelf.

Because we have had no money, we have tried to solve problems for multiple things at once. We use creativity to solve decisions. I was inspired by the Oatly model of putting creatives in all parts of the business, on every decision. That is how we try to solve problems. Let’s just think our way out of this problem before we throw money at it.

What have been the most effective forms of ‘house media’ for you?

Organic Instagram does really well for us. A recent film had nearly a million views, so we use that channel to be creative. We do not use that channel to sell at all. We trust that people are smart enough to look at something, and if they are interested, they will find out more themselves.

We do not have that much media. We have the box. We are going to be doing some inserts soon. We have never had the cash to print outer boxes, so we have always done branded tape. That is creative problem solving: we cannot print on the box because it is too much, so we make the tape because it is way cheaper and looks cooler.

On the back of the pack, on the rip strip, we have little moments like ‘the path to enlightenment is paved with probiotics.’ Fun little moments where we can be more playful.

LinkedIn has done a really good job for us in terms of exposure and getting seen. It is a good sales channel as well. I do not do as much founder-led content because I want the brand itself to be able to stand up. I try not to lift the curtain too much.

I have been writing about what I call the ‘Functional Trap’: brands becoming so obsessed with communicating functional superiority that they become serious and forgettable. How do you think about that?

I agree. If what is great about your product is just that anyone can shove more protein in something, then you do not really have a brand. You are in a race to functionality.

For us, the cultures are built into the brand. They are built into the name (Oat ‘Cult’), which means we do not have to lead with it. I have always seen it as a huge value-add, an additional reason to believe rather than the reason to believe.

I have always wanted it to be the brand that you buy into. But taste is often overlooked. It actually tastes really nice. Quite a few people message me saying, ‘No offence, but I did not actually think it would taste so nice. I thought the brand was so mad that you were overcompensating for something.’

It had not really occurred to me that they thought we were overcompensating because it was going to taste like feet. But actually, the product tastes really good.

So we have resisted the protein race and those kinds of things. That is a trap.

Were you ever tempted to lead harder with the science?

I think there is a job we need to do better: educating consumers around the benefits of eating overnight oats with live cultures over a longer period of time. If you eat them for longer, you will feel better. And as a direct-to-consumer business, if people eat them more, we sell more.

The biggest people who buy the product are people who eat it religiously, daily, because they suddenly feel better. So there is a job for us to do in terms of educating lower down the funnel, but I do not think it will ever be something we lead with as a core message.

With Meta and direct-to-consumer advertising, you can create messaging to further evidence it. You start with the mad animation, and then if someone still has not bought, they start being served more reasons to believe. The science is more like nudges through the funnel, rather than the first message we go out with.

There is a belief in wellness that consumers are now forensic about ingredients. Do you agree with that?

If you go into a supermarket and look at what is predominantly on the shelves, it is still the big players in cereals and products. I think people are more savvy and care a little bit more, but I do not think that is everybody.

When you’re in a business like this, it’s quite easy to believe your own hype, and act as if everyone really cares about wellness, when the majority of people do not check the back of pack. But because we are smaller, we can appeal specifically to the people who do.

If you are someone who cares about what is in the product, then we want you to know that we have done the work. We have third-party tested. We have made sure the ingredients are clean. I give it to my kids. That is my test.

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When do functional benefits become important? Discovery, repeat purchase, word of mouth, retailer meetings?

It depends on what the functional product is. If it is a weird mushroom that no one has heard of, then you obviously need to educate people on why this is a good thing to have. Otherwise people will not know.

I think we get away with live cultures because brands like Yakult and others have done a good job. People understand that gut is important. They do not fully understand why, but they know it is important. So we play with that.

The reason we add live gut bacteria is that we found people were making overnight oats with kefir. Lots of people told us they were adding kefir because the efficacy of overnight oats is that you feel good after eating them, and it is good for gut health.

If you are that person already inclined that way, then you want the additional benefit. It is another reason to believe. We just want to pile on the reasons to believe, though not to the detriment of the brand world we’ve built.

If a founder came to you with an incredible new ingredient or breakthrough nutritional benefit, what advice would you give them?

If the functional benefit is new, I would take a format that customers are familiar with already and play in that space. Take something people are used to and keep it in that format.

You cannot educate someone on what to do with the product. That is the challenge. Sometimes you have an amazing product, but you are educating people on what to do with it. Then all your marketing spend is telling me what I am meant to do with it, and not why your brand.

You need a lot of money to do that. Fundamentally, I would say leave NPD to the big guys. You innovate in brand. That is what we decided to do. We are not educating people that oats are good or live cultures are good. Other people have done that for us.

What do others misunderstand about the overnight oats opportunity?

I think a lot of people do not understand the science behind what makes overnight oats work. People think it is a TikTok trend that looks quite nice. But it is very hard to photograph. It looks horrendous. It looks like mush.

The reason it is so powerful is the efficacy of it. The fermentation of it. If people understand the efficacy of the product and how it works and why it works, there is an opportunity for a whole new category that retailers are sleeping on at the moment.

If you talk about moat, I understand the actual space. I have researched it. I have not just put some seeds in a pack. I have met founders in the same space who said they just shoved some grains in a box. They did not understand why overnight oats are popular.

They misunderstand the consumer and why consumers are eating it. They are not just eating it because it looks good on TikTok. There is another reason, and it is not convenience.

If there’s one thing CPG founders should take from Oat Cult, what would it be?

Anyone can make overnight oats. Private label could make a copycat of the product formulation. We even have that in our pitch deck: ‘anyone can make overnight oats. But there is only one Oat Cult’. It is from my mind and my co-founder’s mind. It is a weird, slightly odd, strange brand, and it is not something you can do in private label. Why would you?

The thing we wanted to disrupt was brand, not product. We know other businesses can create the product. In fact, they have. The category is booming. Even the biggest players have launched a product, which is really exciting.

Our moat is how we behave and the way we execute the brand. It is not just the brand world; it is what we are willing to do that others are not. We will pretend to sacrifice someone in a piece of content. We will do things that a boardroom would not approve.

That gives us the freedom to appeal to people who say, no other brand could do what you do. That is the thing we stick to.

I am happy for bigger brands to educate more in overnight oats. I do not want to have to lead all of that. I want to come behind and take all the glory.

To learn more about Oat Cult visit https://oatcult.com/.

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What exactly is Oat Cult challenging? Not necessarily who, but what assumption or category norm are you fighting against?

Multiple things. I guess there’s my own sense of what a brand can be and what you can say and what you can do. That is a huge part of what drives Oat Cult as a challenger.

Why can’t wellness be cool?

Some people might squint at Oat Cult and say it feels a bit like Liquid Death. What are they seeing, and what are they missing?

But if you get into the nitty gritty, the brands are very different. Liquid Death has a punk, thrash metal, rock and roll type feel. Ours borrows from old English folk tradition in the UK.

**We often say a brand for everyone is a brand for no one. Who is Oat Cult not for?**

I think it is self-selecting. I don’t think there is a demographic type. We just don’t take ourselves very seriously, and I think we appeal to people who have that similar feeling.

You come from a creative background. What advantage did that give you when building Oat Cult? And any disadvantages?

As a creative, the fun bit has always been the brand building. The creation of the brand, the brand world, how it looks, what the name is. All those things are super fun.

Then, once we knew that it could work, the brand was the dessert at the end. Cool, now we get to do it because, on paper, this is a credible business.

Did your creative training give you a more instinctive understanding of culture rather than just product features?

I just thought, this will be fun. We can have fun with this. I did not know exactly where it would go, but I knew intuitively that this would be cool.

Were there any ways in which ‘agency Ben’ and ‘founder Ben’ disagreed with each other?

There are lots of times where I would love to spend more money on things, or do more marketing. But fundamentally, running the P&L, I know we cannot afford it.

There is a moment where I have to talk to myself and say: as exciting as that is, it will not help the business at the moment. So you put it on the back burner.

Things like new products and other fun stuff would be really fun to do. But we resist the urge.

Challengers are often forced into creativity because they do not have the luxury of big budgets. What constraints have made Oat Cult better?

The pack is exactly 15 centimetres across, and that is because, for our co-manufacturer, that was the smallest they could make the machine to fill single serves. They had never done that before.

And it became a distinctive brand asset. To the manufacturer, it was the smallest they could do. But to other people, it looks like a very large and generous single-serve pouch.

What have been the most effective forms of ‘house media’ for you?

On the back of the pack, on the rip strip, we have little moments like ‘the path to enlightenment is paved with probiotics.’ Fun little moments where we can be more playful.

I have been writing about what I call the ‘Functional Trap’: brands becoming so obsessed with communicating functional superiority that they become serious and forgettable. How do you think about that?

I agree. If what is great about your product is just that anyone can shove more protein in something, then you do not really have a brand. You are in a race to functionality.

It had not really occurred to me that they thought we were overcompensating because it was going to taste like feet. But actually, the product tastes really good.

So we have resisted the protein race and those kinds of things. That is a trap.

Were you ever tempted to lead harder with the science?

There is a belief in wellness that consumers are now forensic about ingredients. Do you agree with that?

‍

‍

When do functional benefits become important? Discovery, repeat purchase, word of mouth, retailer meetings?

If a founder came to you with an incredible new ingredient or breakthrough nutritional benefit, what advice would you give them?

If the functional benefit is new, I would take a format that customers are familiar with already and play in that space. Take something people are used to and keep it in that format.

What do others misunderstand about the overnight oats opportunity?

They misunderstand the consumer and why consumers are eating it. They are not just eating it because it looks good on TikTok. There is another reason, and it is not convenience.

If there’s one thing CPG founders should take from Oat Cult, what would it be?

That gives us the freedom to appeal to people who say, no other brand could do what you do. That is the thing we stick to.

I am happy for bigger brands to educate more in overnight oats. I do not want to have to lead all of that. I want to come behind and take all the glory.

To learn more about Oat Cult visit https://oatcult.com/.

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Putting the joy back into work (with Bruce Daisley)

If work takes up so much of our lives, and so much of work’s output is down to discretionary effort, how do we make work more engaging - as leaders of teams, and as workers ourselves?

Bruce Daisley has become a world expert on it. Previously the MD of YouTube in the UK, Bruce was the European Head of Twitter when he started exploring the meaning and future of work in a podcast, Eat Sleep Work Repeat. His first book, The Joy of Work, was a Sunday Times number one business bestseller and an FT Book of the Month. He is also the host of the hugely successful podcast ‘Eat Sleep Work Repeat’.

In this episode Adam and Bruce first discuss how to get rid of the things that suck the joy out of work, and then how to create a positive buzz in our engagement, as an individual and as a team.

They talk about:

What the really big disruption in work has been (and it’s not wfh)
The essential foundations for making any impact whatsoever on engagement in a culture
The two key indicators of real engagement at work
Why idle time is so important
The real enemy of productivity in an organisation
The power of Positive Affect
The surprising importance of laughter

And why, when so much is known about how to drive up engagement at work, so little of that knowledge makes it into the leadership meetings of big organisations.

Listen to Eat Sleep Work Repeat:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/eat-sleep-work-repeat/id1190000968

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5KUW5Lu36O4nnfIFqIIUh4

Bruce's books:

The Joy of Work: 30 Ways to Fix Your Work Culture and Fall in Love with Your Job

Fortitude: The Myth of Resilience, and the Secrets of Inner Strength

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/

Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish. Thanks to our editor Ruth, our producer Travis, and to Tiny Podcasts.