The room March 30, 2026 4 min read
Why we stopped charging for oat milk
A small change to the price list that says more about how we think than most of the menu does.
Written by Jonas Weir
We used to charge sixty cents for oat milk. We stopped in January, and it is the change guests have thanked us for most.
The old reasoning
Barista oat costs us roughly twice what dairy does per litre. Charging the difference felt like straightforward cost recovery, and every café we knew did the same thing.
Why it was wrong
Because of who was paying it. The surcharge landed almost entirely on people who cannot drink dairy, and on people who have made a decision about it that we happen to agree with. We were running a small tax on both groups and calling it fairness.
The number was also not large enough to matter to us and just large enough to be annoying at the counter — the classic sign of a bad policy.
What we did instead
We raised every milk drink by fifteen cents and removed the surcharge entirely. Roughly a third of our milk drinks are made with oat, so the arithmetic works out close to neutral. Nobody has mentioned the fifteen cents. Several people mention the oat every week.
