The film depicts a kingpin and her bodyguard who runs an oat drink syndicate in the underworld of their school. It’s a lucrative business in a place where oat drinks are still not welcome.

Every year, around 160 million liters of cow's milk are served in schools, subsidized by the EU's so-called School Milk Scheme. Encouraging children to consume milk products when their eating habits are being formed. At the same time, the EU has ambitious climate goals, which among other things, must be achieved by increasing the consumption of plant-based food. It doesn't quite add up, does it?

The EU might agree it doesn't. They decided to review the regulations for the School Milk Subsidy with the aid of an "open consultation," which could open the possibility of including plant-based drinks in the scheme.

We launched the film-centric campaign "Normalize it!" to shake things up and start a debate on the issue. The starting point was that children today are forced to pick cow's milk at school – if they want something else, they need to get it themselves.

The filmed stirred up a lot of emotions. Not only did it start a wide debate about milk subsidies, the campaign generated a 340% increase in feedback submissions to the EU (7155 compared to the average of 2091 per open consultation). This has led to multiple countries declaring an openness to include plant-based drinks in the School Milk Scheme (!) and most importantly to the EU deciding to revisit the matter in a vote to update the School Milk Scheme to include plant-based alternatives(!!). The vote takes place in the spring of 2023. Fingers are crossed.

The EU School Scheme is a financial aid given to schools in the EU for them to buy fruit, vegetables and milk to students. For milk, it is paid per liter of milk consumed. This is an unfair advantage the milk industry has had since the 1960’s and has been pretty much unchallenged since then. Until now.