Otis was founded as New Zealand’s first homegrown dairy alternative back in 2018. In the waaay waaay back days when people mistakenly thought we were saying we made ‘goat milk’ instead of oat milk.
Around the time we founded the company we read a little book called The B Corp Handbook: How to Use Business as a Force for Good.
What a great book. In the opening few pages it said ‘if you're a small start-up and you're reading this book with grand intentions of doing business for good, awesome! But first go away and grow a financially sustainable company, before you start out on your B Corp journey’.
Sage advice. So, we promptly shut the book and set out to grow and foster Otis to what it is today. Always with the intention of one day circling back to achieve our goal of joining the amazing B Corp family and use Otis as a force for good.
5 years later and we are incredibly proud of what we have created as a small hardworking team of humans. We certainly aren’t perfect, we’ve made a bucket load of mistakes, and we’ve learnt and grown from them, but we love our work. We love our farming and hospitality communities. We most certainly love our beautiful country and its stunning natural environment. We love Aotearoa New Zealand and the incredible melting pot of cultures and ethnicities that make us who we are, and we certainly couldn’t do it without our incredible stakeholders that back us every day, day in day out, to do what we do.
So what exactly is a B Corp? They are companies verified by a rigorous review process to meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. It’s a certification that signifies a commitment to social and environmental impact beyond just profit-making. It means prioritising people, the planet, and purpose alongside financial success. It also means joining a roster of global brands that all think the same way.
As a team of 5 humans, over the past 15 months we have poured ourselves into the incredibly detailed process, evaluating our entire business across five key pillars; workers, community, customers, environment and governance.
So here we are. We made the B Team. And we couldn’t be prouder, but the real work starts now.
The One Percent Fund
The One Percent Fund is where we dedicate 1% of our annual sales to fuel projects like the incredible work of Adrian, Briar and the team at Plant Research NZ. They have been the quiet over achievers behind 20 years of hands-on oat R&D, ensuring our varieties are top-notch worldwide. From pest resistance to climate resilience, they are helping Otis and oat growers redefine and lead in oat genetics.
By drinking Otis, you are directly support our growers. Simple as that. Watch our film below.
Packaging
Paper Pulp versus Fossil Fuel. Thats what it comes down to.
1 -2 million plastic bottles are consumed globally every second, pulled from latent fossil fuel (oil) buried underground for millenia. We simply don’t agree with drinking the plastic kool-aid and opted for a container with a far lighter footprint, which is widely regarded as fit for purpose moving forward globally.
NZ recycles somewhere between 8-12% of all plastic it consumes, the majority of this being shipped to SE Asia for incineration.We feel we should be mitigating fossil fuel use at every step along our supply chain.
Our Tetra cartons have historically got a bad wrap in NZ, in large part due to fossil fuel lobbysts and miseducation. However, upon months of research and peer reviews diving into the footprints of all available packaging types, we decided to take the road less travelled and opt for our Tetra Pak cartons. No thank you to the plastic Kool-Aid.
What NZ lacks, which comes as no surprise, is the modern infrastructure to recycle alternate, low footprint packaging formats like Tetra Pak. Introducing saveBOARD.
saveBOARD, based out of Hamilton, operate as the end of life solution for our packs, turning them and many other similar cartons into much needed building materials.
You can access the nationwide carton collect scheme below via the handy map, and we look forward to the day where we can deposit cartons into council kerbside recycling bins, and wave goodbye to plastics pulled from oil deposits.
CONTAINER RETURN
Can I recycle my Otis containers?
In short yes, Liquid Paperboard Packaging (LPB, commonly known as Tetra Pak) is ‘recyclable’ and has the lowest carbon footprint of all packaging types. However, NZ’s archaic waste and recycling system has not yet been able to plug the saveBOARD LPB recycling plant into our nationwide kerbside collection scheme, so therefore it is not yet nationally ‘kerbside collected’.
However you can find a drop-off location close to you where your cartons can be collected and transported to saveBOARD below:
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from Stockist store locator...
Below is a handy diagram for how best to prepare your cartons for saveBOARD.
Cut along the top and side of the carton. *Note: leave the Cap attached.
Completely open up the carton
Rinse clean. Job done! Find your closest container return site.
Impact Report
Being conscious of our business footprint and having a clear plan in place to reduce and mitigate these effects is something all modern brands simply must deliver on.
We’re a small company with big ambition to create positive change. Our sustainability plan outlines not only our smaller daily ambitions but more importantly the required actions to create the change we seek longterm.
We have focused our plan around three pillars: planet, people & community.
Read our full sustainability plan and our carbon reduction plan below.
