Huge promotion for dairy-free milk

As far as mainstream promotions for vegan alternatives go, this is one of the best I’ve heard.

Offer people a free coffee outside a busy London station but only if they take one made with oat milk. Otherwise, they have to pay £2 for a black cup of coffee. I love it!

And it gets better. This promotion is running for an entire week!

Non-dairy milk superstar Oatly is hosting a super-sized coffee giveaway on the green at Boxpark Shoreditch (just next to Shoreditch High Street Station) between Monday April 3 and Sunday April 9, 2017.

The pop will run between 11am and 7pm Monday through to Saturday, with shorter opening times of 11am until 5pm on Sunday.

But what is going on at the marketing event?

Members of the public will be invited to watch skilled baristas create top quality coffees using the Oatly Barista Edition. Once they have been shown how to make the hot drinks to perfection and given a chance to win an Oatly t-shirt, they will then be given the coffee free of charge.

Oatly is undertaking this huge week-long advertising campaign to convince people that coffee without dairy milk is not a scary prospect and that it can actually be delicious.

Oatly will be pushing the message that choosing oat milk over dairy is a kinder, more compassionate choice that also has huge benefits for the environment.

The best part of the promotion happens when someone rejects the coffee with oat milk and asks for a black coffee.

Anyone refusing to try a coffee made with Oatly will be asked to pay £2 for a cup made black.

I absolutely love this cheeky approach to promoting plant-based alternatives to dairy. It is a sly payback for the countless times vegans have been asked to pay extra to get a dairy-free drink in coffee shops all over London.

You can wish Oatly well with their promotion over on Twitter and get along to the pop-up coffee shop in Shoreditch next week. You might even win one of these cute Post Milk Generation t-shirts in their giveaway.

Take some non-vegans friends with you. Free coffee might just be the thing that gets them to consider the switch!