Case study

The added benefits in fortifying oat drinks

11 September 2025

Topics

“It’s reinforced our belief that focusing on what’s right - like making healthier products - also makes good business sense”

- Josh Barton CEO, Brose

Brose is Scotland’s first and only producer of oat drinks - a healthy and delicious alternative to dairy and the most popular and fastest-growing plant-based drink in the UK.

They use 100% gluten-free Scottish oats to create a sustainable oat drink that’s full of natural goodness. As well as creating products from locally grown Scottish oats, they’re committed to operating with a social and environmental conscience.

Why fortify?

We produce three varieties of oat drink – original fortified, fresh barista style and fortified chocolate.

Having identified a significant market opportunity to make two of these products more nutritionally robust, we used the £2,000 from the Reformul8 Challenge Fund 4 to focus on enriching them with vitamins B12 and D2.

We already had a certain amount of added calcium, but we wanted to lean into that and make it a product that provided similar levels of minerals and vitamins that you get from dairy.

These vitamins help your body absorb the calcium, which in turn helps build bones and keep teeth healthy, and also helps prevent osteoporosis in older people.

Coincidentally, the reformulation coincided with our transition to becoming a gluten-free product. Studies have shown that while there are more young people with lactose intolerance, older people are also having digestive and inflammatory issues which can be helped by going both dairy and gluten free.

We really needed to understand how the vitamins would interact with other ingredients in the oat drink and make sure the final product met our nutritional targets.

What we did

Our two fortified oat drinks are designed for children and families. We already supply a few nursery schools and it’s a really nice, naturally sweet gluten-free product.

The objective was to create a product that had 20% of the recommended daily allowance (RDA) in calcium, vitamin B12 and vitamin D2.

The reformulation project spanned six months and was led by a small dedicated team that included our CEO Josh Barton and food technologist Simon Walker. 

  • The majority of the funding was spent on fairly extensive lab testing.
  • The project also covered the costs of factory trials, where we made small-scale batches of the reformulated product for internal testing and feedback. We went through five or six trials to get the formulation spot on with no loss of taste or flavour.
  • A significant amount of time was dedicated to finding the right ingredient supplier who could provide high quality vitamins and miner als and offer expert advice on how they would behave within our product, ensuring they did not degrade over time, and the product maintained its nutritional integrity throughout its shelf life.

The findings

We were really pleased to achieve the outcome we set ourselves in the brief:

  • Our reformulated oat drink now provides 20% of the RDA for calcium, and vitamins D2 and B12 – which makes it comparable to dairy milk as well as the most fortified oat drinks in the market. Previously our drink had a small amount of calcium, somewhere around 0.15% per 100ml and no vitamin D2 or B12 at all.
  • Dairy milk contains roughly 120-130mg of calcium and about 0.4-0.5µg of vitamin B12 per 100g, depending on the fat content. Vitamin D is not naturally present in significant amounts in cow’s milk. Following reformulation, Brose Original contains 160mg of calcium, 0.6µg of vitamin B12 and 1µg of vitamin D2.
  • The project also confirmed that nutritional enhancements can be made without negatively impacting the final product’s sensory attributes. Yes, we did it all without changing the taste or texture. This was our main goal - to make it healthier without compromising on flavour, which is crucial in keeping ourcustomers happy.

The benefits and learning points

One piece of advice we would offer is to do your homework. Make sure that you understand what your competitors are doing, what the market looks like and where trends are likely to lead in the next 12-24 months. Don’t make assumptions because you need to be putting yourself into a place where it’s going to have a longer term benefit.

In our case, the reformulation process was actually easier than we expected, and with the external support on offer, there has really only been benefit to us at Brose.

Not only has it resulted in a better product but it’s opened our eyes to new market opportunities. We’re set up primarily for business-to-business but we’ve started supplying a few Scotmids locally so it’s certainly helped our retail offering.

While our barista oat drink still accounts for 90% of our sales, the reformulated product has given us a strong footing in different sectors, like schools and hospitals.

At the moment we supply university cafes, restaurants and canteens and we’re now supplying the NHS’s own social enterprise Aroma cafes with our products, a perfect alignment with our mission.

In addition, the fortification work we did with our oat drinks paved the way for us to carry out a separate project with our chocolate oat drink.

At the moment we supply university cafes, restaurants and canteens and we’re now supplying the NHS’s own social enterprise Aroma cafes with our products, a perfect alignment with our mission.

In addition, the fortification work we did with our oat drinks paved the way for us to carry out a separate project with our chocolate oat drink.

We used a £4,000 grant from the Healthier Food Service Fund to reduce the sugar and saturated fat in that product, aiming to maintain its rich, creamy flavour while making it a healthier option.

The good news is we went on to reduce the fat content in the fortified ready-to-drink chocolate oat drink by 57% from 1.6g per 100ml to 0.9g per 100ml.

We did try to reduce the sugar but at the end of the day, we decided that we liked how the product tasted already. There’s no added sugar in any case and we didn’t want to compromise on the taste and flavour.