With deadpan humour and a serious goal to shift how we farm, Boring Oat Milk has built Aotearoa’s bestselling plant milk and taken Kiwi oats across the Tasman.
Six thousand litres of oat milk. That was Morgan Maw’s goal back in 2018 when she applied for an AGMARDT grant. Today, up to 120,000 litres of Boring Oat Milk is produced per day.
In May 2025, Boring launched into 1000 Woolworths supermarkets across Australia. In New Zealand, it’s now our bestselling plant milk, beating out big international brands like Vitasoy. It’s right up there with Weetbix, which is the only product that sells more than Boring’s Barista Oat Milk in Foodstuffs North Island’s breakfast category.
AGMARDT provided $22,664 for researching oat varietals, suitable arable farming sites, and bench-scale processing trials. The 2018 grant enabled Boring to get started sooner, recalls Maw. “It doesn’t sound like much, but I really didn’t have any money. Without it, I would have had to raise investment a lot earlier, I would have had to give away more of my business. It gave me a real head start.”
Boring had a first-mover advantage, launching three years before any other New Zealand oat milk brand, but that came with a lot of risk. “It’s a product that no one had made in New Zealand. We weren’t even doing any plant milks in New Zealand.”
Maw was driven by her enthusiasm for oats – not as a food, but for what they can do. Dominating the plant-based milk aisle is a happy byproduct of her real goal: for New Zealand dairy farmers to grow more oats. The goal beyond that? Oats are nitrogen-hungry, and increasing their land area decreases surplus nitrogen, improving the health of Aotearoa’s fresh water.
And Boring is growing demand for oats, by diverting both dairy and non-dairy milk consumers to oat milk. The market share of oat milk among non-dairy milks has grown from 20% in 2021 to 40% in 2025 (Neilsen).
Boring has grown too, from just Maw, her partner and a food technologist supported by the AGMARDT grant, to a staff of 60 across Boring and its sister juice and smoothie brand, Picky, both owned and manufactured by Apollo Foods. Apollo was initially Boring’s contract manufacturer, then bought the business in 2021. Maw in turn became a shareholder in Apollo, and the company’s head of brand. “I’d rather have a smaller piece of a bigger pie than the other way around,” she says.
It was a pragmatic decision at a time when Covid was causing rapid cost increases, putting huge pressure on low-margin products. “Honestly, if I hadn’t structured it that way, if they weren’t my partner, Boring wouldn’t be around now. We’ve got some margin there now because we make it ourselves. And it’s nice to have other people caring about Boring, not just me.”
The business has been brand-led from the start. Early on, the company engaged DayMonthYear design group to create Boring Oat Milk as a playful identity to stand out against competitors. “We’ve always been very clear, we don’t want to be a vegan activist brand,” says Maw. “We want to be the gateway plant milk, to get people to try it.”
They embraced the inherent boring-ness of a plain milk product, and added a droll, very Kiwi wit. Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords is their humour inspiration: “We’re always like, what would Jemaine say?”
We think Jemaine would approve the Boring tagline: ‘A New Zealand oat milk company making oat milk in New Zealand with New Zealand oats.’
What’s next for Boring? Maw’s steadily making her way through the three goals outlined in her final report to AGMARDT in September 2019: “Soft launch into New Zealand market this year. Followed by launch into Australia next year. Be the world’s most loved oat milk.”
Progress may have been a little slower than anticipated – it was three years before Boring launched in New Zealand, and 2023 when Boring entered Australia – but with both goals now conquered she’s moving on to the third. Boring is currently focussed on Vietnam, with the rest of the world to follow.
Grant: AG-002019 Bonnie Oat Milk
Date: November 2018 – September 2019