“Why do we exist as a company?” is not the sort of existential question CEOs tend to ask, especially if they’re at the mercy of a quarterly reporting schedule. But it’s one that exercises Toni Petersson of Oatly.
Since becoming CEO of the Swedish oat drinks company in 2012, he’s transformed the Malmö-based brand into one that thinks about itself as doing more than simply producing and selling a product. Founded in the 1990s, the company grew out of home-grown Swedish research from Lund University, and uses that patented enzyme technology to emulate the way the human body breaks down...