Oatly Whips Up Cake & Custard Giveaway with UK Rapper Giggs

Swedish oat milk giant Oatly has teamed up with British rapper Giggs for a limited-edition drop of dairy-free cake and custard kits.

A ceramic plate, a steel spoon, a textile napkin, and some custard – all are on the table in a giveaway contest by the world’s largest oat milk company and the UK’s “rap landlord”.

Oatly’s latest quirky marketing campaign features Giggs, the British rapper behind Walk in da Park and Landlord, and his love for the brand’s hard-to-find vanilla custard.

Born out of “a shared inability to digest dairy”, Custard by Giggs involves 500 limited-edition dairy-free cake and custard gifts, featuring custom tableware, which will be dished out at Ayres Bakery in his hometown of Peckham in south London tomorrow. For those who miss the drop, 30 kits are available online too.

The campaign intends to raise awareness about the prevalence of lactose intolerance in the UK, and calls on retailers to embrace Oatly’s custard much more widely.

Catering to Brits’ lactose intolerance

The idea for the collaboration came from Giggs, who approached Oatly after struggling to find its vanilla custard in supermarkets. “I grew up on cake and custard, but when my lactose intolerance kicked in when I was around eight years old and started making me sick, the dessert I loved had to leave my life,” he said.

Giggs is among the five million Brits who suffer from intolerance to this sugar, making up 8% of the population. And as is the case globally, its prevalence is much higher in Black, Asian and other ethnic minorities – twice more, in fact, than white groups in the UK, according to a 2,000-person survey commissioned by Oatly.

The research further revealed that two-thirds of people who have lactose intolerance miss out on their favourite desserts, and over half (52%) have to overlook key food experiences due to a lack of alternatives. “When I found out my son was lactose intolerant too, we used to go all over the place looking for dairy-free alternatives so he wouldn’t miss out,” recalled Giggs.

“There’s not a lot of options out there, but one day we found Oatly’s Vanilla Custard, and it tasted banging. Not enough people know about it, so I reached out to Oatly, and here we are a few months later,” he added.

“When Giggs messaged us at the start of the year expressing his love for our Vanilla Custard, we knew this could lead to great things,” said Bryan Carroll, general manager of Oatly UK. “With more than five million people suffering some form of lactose intolerance, it’s actually mad that the default is still so often dairy and nothing else.”

A series of films and a custard-finding tool

To mark the partnership and giveaway, a series of Custard by Giggs films will be rolled out across Oatly and Giggs’s social channel over the next month, which depict several scenes where the rapper plays a bakery owner in south London.

In one spot titled ‘The Queue’, Giggs skips the line outside his bake shop to open the giveaway, while he seems visibly perplexed that he’s served cake without custard in ‘The Doorbell’. And in ‘Cake and Custard Tasting’, viewers see the rapper struggling to decide how best to judge different cakes, before a pour of Oatly custard gets him (almost) going.

“It’s rare to see Giggs lend his face to a brand, so we wanted these films to make this drop feel exclusive and also bring out a side of Giggs the world doesn’t see,” said Kelvin Jone, who directed and co-created the shorts.

The campaign also plays on the lack of availability of certain non-dairy alternatives in the UK, despite the country’s vegan dessert market set to double by 2027 (from a 2022 baseline). Oatly’s research found that 68% of Brits encounter difficulties finding non-dairy alternatives in supermarkets, shops or restaurants.

Since Oatly’s vanilla custard is found only in select retailers in the UK – “I even sent my Mum on quests trying to hunt it down,” Giggs said – the company has launched a Custard Finder tool to help locate the product. “This collaboration aims to encourage retailers to think outside the dairy box,” noted Carroll.

“Giggs has a big personality, so by combining this with the community feeling of bakeshops and the taste of Oatly Custard, we crafted films that build mouthwatering anticipation whilst calling for dairy-free foods like Oatly Custard to be much more widely available, given the prevalence of lactose intolerance in our community,” said Jones.

The Custard by Giggs marketing drive comes shortly after Oatly’s Q3 earnings report, which saw the business’s revenue grow by 11% from the corresponding period in 2023. The UK has been at the forefront of its barista milk evolution, with Oatly rolled out 1.5-litre cartons as well as a Lighter Taste edition made specifically for light-roasted coffee.