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It’s official: Long a 120-team league, Minor League Baseball (MiLB) just added a 121st team. Continuing the recent partnership between oat milk brand Oatly and MiLB, the Malmö Oat Milkers will make their debut in the 2024 season.
Representing Oatly‘s hometown in Sweden, the Oat Milkers will be a rotating cast, with each of MiLB’s 120 teams playing one game this season sporting the Malmö uniforms.
Expanding on Oatly’s presence throughout MiLB stadiums in recent months, Oat Milkers events will feature interactive game experiences from the brand. This includes an oat milk carton throwing out the first pitch, trivia moments and a chance to “sign a contract to be an Oat Milker for a day.” Touchpoints will appear throughout all 120 league stadiums.
The Oat Milkers take the field
“Our first season of partnership with MiLB brought Oatly, an oat milk company from Sweden that knows very little about baseball, further into Minor League Baseball hometowns—tapping into uncharted territory and new audiences for our brand,” Armando Turco, senior vice president of global brand and creative at Oatly, said in a statement. “We’re very excited to continue on this path with the launch of the Malmö Oat Milkers, the only sports team of its kind, that we know of at least.”
Plant-based milk brands including Oatly have recently faced business challenges and increased competition amid a market slowdown. Oatly reported losses of $204 million in the fourth quarter of 2023.
But Oatly’s marketing continues to be bold and venture into new territory. Most recently, in addition to its collaboration with MiLB, it formed a brand partnership with Virgin Voyages.
“We’re not the type of brand to slap our logo on a jersey and walk away (cue the small minority of fans that will, in fact, want us to walk away),” Turco continued. “Instead, our goal was to do our small part to add something to the fan experience, and to rethink the very notion of ‘sponsorship’ by creating something entirely new and characteristically irreverent.”
The Oat Milkers’ season schedule can be found on MiLB’s website, where fans hoping to travel to all 120 MiLB team cities to follow the Oat Milkers can enter to win season tickets.