If Barista Oat Milk Was Invented Today, It Would Look Like MYOM.
Most oat milk innovation happens inside the carton. New flavours. New recipes. New claims. New branding. The carton itself rarely changes.
That is understandable. Once a category settles around a format, the format becomes invisible. It becomes the accepted way things are done, and almost nobody stops to ask whether it is still the right one.
This month, MYOM Barista Oat received two awards from Vegan Food & Living: Best Vegan Barista Milk 2026, and the Editor’s Choice award for Best New Product Launch 2026. We are incredibly proud of both.
But what excites us most is not the awards themselves. It is what they say about the future of oat milk. Because when the judges recognised MYOM, they were not simply recognising a recipe. They were recognising a different way of thinking about how oat milk gets from oat to cup.
Two Awards From The Magazine That Knows
Vegan Food & Living is the UK’s best-selling vegan magazine and one of the most widely read vegan resources online. Part of Anthem Publishing, it covers vegan food, news, nutrition, ethics and lifestyle, and it has been championing plant-based living since it launched at the end of 2015. It is also a multi award-winning brand, which is part of why recognition there carries weight with shoppers.
The Vegan Food & Living Product Awards exist to help readers find the products genuinely worth buying in a category that grows more crowded every year. So, winning two is not a quiet pat on the back. It is a signal, sent to a large and discerning audience, that MYOM is worth a place in their cupboard.
The two awards also recognise two very different things. One is about what is in the glass. The other is about the idea behind the product. Taken together, they tell the whole MYOM story rather neatly.
A Better Way To Oat Milk.
Most oat milk follows a similar journey. Oats are processed, blended with water, packaged into cartons, transported through warehouses and retail networks, carried home, refrigerated, and eventually poured into a coffee. It is a system inherited from dairy. Plant-based milk improved the ingredients. It rarely challenged the infrastructure.
When we started developing MYOM in 2022, we asked a different question. What happens if you remove the water from the supply chain? At first glance it sounds almost too simple. But removing the water changes almost everything.
The product becomes smaller. Storage becomes easier. Transport becomes far more efficient. The format moves from fridge to cupboard. The packaging footprint falls dramatically. And the shopper gets to make a fresh bottle exactly when they need it, rather than opening a carton that has been sitting around for weeks.
Most importantly, you stop shipping litres of water around the country and around the world. That is not a criticism of the category. It is simply an observation. If we were inventing barista oat milk today, with everything we now know about logistics, sustainability and how people actually drink coffee at home, would we really choose to transport a product that is mostly water? The answer felt increasingly obvious to us. That idea became MYOM.
A Better Question Than “Which Oat Milk Tastes Best?”
One of the challenges facing the oat milk category is that innovation often gets reduced to flavour. Taste matters, of course. It matters enormously. Nobody buys a product twice if they do not enjoy drinking it. But taste alone does not explain why categories evolve.
Shoppers also care about convenience, waste, storage, packaging and value. The most successful products tend to improve several of those things at once. That is what we set out to do with MYOM. The goal was never to build a sustainability product that happened to taste acceptable. It was to create a genuinely delicious oat milk that happened to solve several problems at the same time: freshness, storage, portability, packaging, transport, waste and convenience. The hard part was making all of those improvements without compromising the thing people care about most, which is what ends up in the glass.
Best Vegan Barista Milk 2026
Coffee is unforgiving. A product can have an impressive sustainability story, beautiful branding and impeccable credentials, and none of it matters if the milk does not perform. Barista oat milk lives or dies on functionality.
Will it steam? Will it stretch? Will it hold microfoam? Will it complement the coffee rather than dominate it? Can it create cold foam? Can it do all of that consistently, every single day? Those were the questions that shaped MYOM Barista.
The final recipe combines oats, fava bean protein and cold-pressed rapeseed oil to create the structure and texture coffee demands. The result is a barista oat milk that performs hot or cold, while keeping a deliberately short ingredient list. No dipotassium phosphate. No gums. No thickeners. No added sugar. Just ingredients chosen because they contribute something positive to the finished drink.
Winning Best Vegan Barista Milk 2026 suggests that approach resonated with the judges. For a coffee-focused product assessed by people who taste a great deal of plant milk, that is particularly meaningful.
Editor’s Choice: Best New Product Launch 2026
The second award tells a different story. Best Vegan Barista Milk recognises performance. Editor’s Choice recognises innovation. That distinction matters, because the pouch itself is not the innovation. The thinking behind it is.
Many people notice the format first. A small pouch that makes a litre of oat milk feels unusual, because we are conditioned to expect cartons. What they quickly realise is that the format solves problems they did not know they had. Less storage. Less packaging. Less waste. More flexibility. A fresh bottle whenever they want one.
The pouch is not the destination. It is simply the logical consequence of removing water from the supply chain. That is what the Editor’s Choice award recognises. Not a packaging gimmick, but a genuinely different approach to the category, chosen by the editorial team as the launch they rated most highly this year.
Independent Recognition, Twice Over
Earlier this year, both MYOM Original and MYOM Barista also earned approval from The Vegan Choice Awards. Unlike traditional award programmes, Vegan Choice does not rank products or declare category winners. Products are assessed independently by a panel of nutritionists, chefs and industry experts, with blind testing, and recognised on merit throughout the year.
That makes the two sets of recognition complementary rather than repetitive. Vegan Choice approval confirms quality. Vegan Food & Living confirms category leadership. One asks whether a product deserves endorsement. The other asks whether it deserves to win. We are proud to have received both.
Looking At Oat Milk Differently
Most of us never stop to think about oat milk. We pick up a carton, bring it home, put it in the fridge and pour it into our coffee. It is simply how oat milk has always been sold. MYOM started with a simple challenge to that idea. What if there was a better way?
That question sits behind many of the messages in our campaign. If you think all oat milks are the same, think again. If you think the best oat milk comes in a carton, think again. If you’re looking for Best Vegan Barista Milk, this is it. They are not designed to be controversial. They are designed to make people pause and consider something they may never have questioned before. Why do we transport and store litres of water? Why do we fill fridges and recycling bins with cartons? And if there is a better way to enjoy fresh oat milk at home, why wouldn’t we explore it?
For us, innovation is not about making bigger claims. It is about asking better questions. The award-winning MYOM Barista Oat is the result of asking one very simple question: does great oat milk really need to come in a carton at all?
£8 Off for Vegan Food & Living Readers
To celebrate both awards, we have created an exclusive offer for Vegan Food & Living readers. Use code MYOMVFL26 at checkout and get £8 off the MYOM Barista Everyday Bundle.
MYOM 1L Barista Oat Everyday Bundle
Was £18.99
Now £10.99 with code MYOMVFL26
You save £8. Around 42% off.
Shop the Barista Bundle: myom.shop/products/myom-1l-barista-oat-milk-everyday-bundle
Future Oat Milk Might Not Come In A Carton
Awards are wonderful. They recognise the work that goes into building a product, they provide independent validation, and they help new shoppers discover brands they might otherwise overlook. But the most exciting thing about these two is not the trophies. It is what they suggest.
That shoppers are open to new ideas. That categories can evolve. That the assumptions we have inherited are not necessarily the assumptions we need to keep. Oat milk does not have to be made the way it has always been made. It can be fresher, smaller, lighter and more convenient, and still deliver the performance people expect.
Thank you to the team at Vegan Food & Living, and to everyone who has helped us get here. And if barista oat milk was invented today, it might just look a lot like MYOM.
Frequently Asked Questions
What awards did MYOM win at the Vegan Food & Living Product Awards 2026?
MYOM Barista Oat won two awards at the Vegan Food & Living Product Awards 2026: Best Vegan Barista Milk and the Editor’s Choice award for Best New Product Launch. The first recognises how the milk performs in coffee, hot and cold. The second recognises the innovation behind the pouch format and the decision to ship oat milk without the water.
What is MYOM Barista Oat?
MYOM Barista Oat is a concentrated oat milk premix that you mix fresh at home with cold water. Each 130g pouch makes a litre of barista oat milk in about 30 seconds. It contains oats, fava bean protein and cold-pressed rapeseed oil, with no dipotassium phosphate, no gums, no thickeners and no added sugar, and it is fortified with calcium, vitamin D3, vitamin B12 and iodine.
Why is MYOM Barista good for coffee?
MYOM Barista is built around fava bean protein, which gives it the structure to steam, stretch and hold microfoam, as well as to make cold foam straight from the fridge. Because it is mixed fresh from a pouch, the flavour is clean and full, and it foams hot or cold from the same litre. No second carton needed.
How is MYOM different from a carton oat milk?
MYOM is a pouch you mix fresh, not a carton you open and refrigerate. Removing the water means a much smaller, lighter, recyclable mono-material pouch, far less transport, and a product that lives in your cupboard until you make it. It also means the recipe does not need the shelf-stabilising additives that long-life cartons rely on.
Is MYOM suitable for vegans?
Yes. MYOM is fully plant-based and suitable for vegans, with no animal-derived ingredients or by-products at any stage. The vitamin D3 is from a vegan, lichen-derived source. Both MYOM Original and MYOM Barista also carry The Vegan Choice Award 2026 stamp of approval.
How do I use the MYOMVFL26 discount code?
Add the MYOM 1L Barista Oat Everyday Bundle to your basket at myom.shop and enter MYOMVFL26 at checkout. You save £8, bringing the bundle to £10.99.
