After weekend hunt for a rare carton of oat milk, Chris Schulz seeks answers.

“We’re not facing an oat milk shortage,” says a Foodstuffs spokesperson. “We’ve got plenty of stock.”

“I’ve checked in with our team,” says a Countdown spokesperson, “and there’s no issue with our overall oat milk supply.”

“We have a secure supply,” says Simon Coley, co-founder of All Good oat milk. “It goes out to stores regularly.”

“We’re not facing any shortages ourselves,” says Boring Oat Milk founder Morgan Maw.

I’m confused. This past weekend, I visited not one, not two, not three, but four supermarkets, all on a desperate hunt for oat milk. My son guzzles the stuff like it’s liquid gold. He’s 12 and can’t handle dairy so downs up to a litre of alt-milk a day. Sometimes more.

He splashes it on his muesli, uses it in his chocolate smoothies and often just drinks giant glasses of it, plain and cold, straight from the fridge. Look, I did my best.

We normally have a stockpile, but lately oat milk seems like it’s getting harder to find. At every supermarket we trekked to, the oat milk was all gone. Most alternative milks were out of stock, with cardboard boxes sitting on sad empty shelves where fresh cartons of non-dairy milk used to be.

My son was bereft, distraught. He complained. Relentlessly. To me. Like I had something to do with it. So I did what any good journalist stuck in this situation would do and fired off some emails.

The responses did not clarify the situation.

I asked several supermarkets and oat milk founders if there was indeed an oat milk shortage. I expected the answer to be yes. After all, over the past two years we’ve grown accustomed to shortages from toilet paper to chicken nuggets to good old doughnuts.

But Foodstuffs, which owns New World and Pak’nSave, told me I was making it all up. “[It’s] going out to stores regularly,” they say, a sentiment that also came from Countdown. All Good’s Coley confirms they have solid supplies, and so does Boring’s Maw.

Were my eyes deceiving me? I was sitting at my desk at work scratching my head when a workmate came over with some good news. Three litres of organic Otis oat milk had been delivered to the office as part of a promo package, surely enough to tide my son over for a few days.

By the following morning, after gulping it down at breakfast, it was nearly all gone. He’d made up for lost time. When I checked in at my local supermarket later that day, I found one lone carton of Vitasoy sitting at the back of the shelf. One. I felt bad buying it – what if someone else had an oat milk-addict son like mine? – but I did it anyway.

If there’s really no oat milk shortage, where is it all? I decided to dig deeper. I asked more questions. Coley was the first to reply, and he confirmed oat milk sales are definitely up. “It’s the number one alternative milk,” he said. “Other alt milks like soy are out of stock which is bound to be increasing demand for oat milk.”

Hmm. I asked Maw the same question. She confirmed Boring’s sales are booming. “Last week was our biggest sales week ever, up about 40% on a typical week,” she said. “If Boring isn’t on a shelf, it’s because we’re selling too fast and the supermarkets can’t keep up with restocking it.”

There it is: oat milk’s selling so fast they can’t keep it on the shelf before it’s whipped away by thirsty consumers like us. Here’s where the countrywide staff shortages are having an impact. Product just isn’t getting to shelves as fast as we’re used to. Foodstuffs spokesperson Emma Wooster says: “It is cold and flu season, and with Covid on top I think most businesses are short on people from time to time.”

So there you have it. If oat milk, or any milk, or any other product you fancy, is out of stock at your local supermarket, your only option is to head out the back, find the pallets loaded with the boxes you want, and stock the shelves yourself.

Or maybe ask a staff member nicely to do it for you (if you can find one).