Another post about oat drink

 

New packaging of Arla Jord (Jörđ), March 2024

The rebrand of JORD (JÖRĐ) oat drink, in March 2024. The basic difference is that it used to be organic and now it isn't. 

That wasn't so hard to say, was it? Except for the company themselves, who have done their absolute best to bury this brute fact amid evasive fluff about their exciting refresh, with desperate emphasis on the added vitamins. (Once your base doesn't come from organic sources, you may as well add cheap vits that are also from non-organic sources.)

It's a common-or-garden lack of integrity, typical of companies addressing the public. Could it be done differently? Is a culture of deceit simply something we factor in? 

Pre-relaunch packaging of Jord (Jörđ), when it was an organic product.

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Jörđ (pronounced "yerth") means "earth" in Old Norse and is also the name of the obscure goddess or giantess who was the mother of Thor. Not to be confused with Wagner's Erda, one of the Norns: her name (Urđr in Old Norse) meant "fate".

The product name is often simplified to Jord, which happens to mean "earth" in modern Swedish (pronounced "yood").

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Also pictured above, Plenish oat drink, which is still an organic product. Of course we will now buy Plenish or organic Oatly instead of Jord. But Plenish doesn't entirely escape my strictures. The oats are labelled as EU agriculture, but the company website says nothing about their place of origin. My assumption is they're sourced from an EU-wide collection facility. Fine: it's not as romantically suggestive as a single source (like Oatly's Landskrona) or even the vague Nordic origin claimed by Jord, but it's hardly a disgrace. Why not be candid? Why automatically conceal your operations? 

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What none of the vegetable drink suppliers talk  about is the basically non-recyclable nature of the packaging (cardboard bonded with plastic). It's an irony that plastic bottles of the kind used for fresh cow's milk are possibly better from a recycling point of view. (Though, I gather, not much better.)

For capitalism to proceed, there needs to be a certain shared blindness to its environmental and human costs. Consumers and employees alike need reassurance. It's what company literature is all about. 

Historic Oatly packaging: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/04/specimens-of-literature-of-sweden-oatly.html