The high street is adapting with incredible speed. Big chains such as Marks & Spencer and Pret a Manger have introduced vegan ranges, Wagamama has a new vegan menu, Pizza Hut recently joined Pizza Express and Zizzi in offering vegan pizzas, while last year Guinness went vegan and stopped using fish bladders in its brewing process, after two and a half centuries. Scrolling through Twitter’s popular #veganhour (an hour of online recipes and ideas running 7-8pm every Tuesday, and trending at number seven nationally when I looked), alongside less surprising corporate interventions from Holland & Barrett and Heavenly Organics is a tweet from Toby Carvery, trumpeting its vegan cherry and chocolate torte. Sainsbury’s and Tesco have introduced extended new ranges of vegan products, while the latter recently appointed American chef Derek Sarno to the impressive job title of director of plant-based innovation.
If this is the year of mainstream veganism, as every trend forecaster and market analyst seems to agree, then there is not one single cause, but a perfect plant-based storm of factors. People cite one or more of three key motives for going vegan – animal welfare, environmental concerns and personal health – and it is being accompanied by an endless array of new business startups, cookbooks, YouTube channels, trendy events and polemical documentaries. The traditional food industry is desperately trying to catch up with the flourishing grassroots demand. “What do you mean, weak, limp and weedy? In 2017, the vegan category is robust, energetic, and flush with crowdfunding cash,” ran an article headlined “Vegan Nation” in industry bible the Grocer in November, pointing to new plant-based burger company Vurger, which hit its £150,000 investment target in little more than 24 hours. [...]
There’s been a knock-on effect to their success, he says, with numerous other restaurants in the city beginning to offer vegan options on their menus – and White is preparing to open the first vegan food shop in Blackpool, too. One of the main drivers, he says, is the critical mass of information available online, both motivating people to change in the first place and making it easier than ever to do so. “When people see documentaries like Cowspiracy, one is enough. The fact social media is as big as it is now, it spreads things so much faster. I think that’s why it’s mushrooming right now. And it is mushrooming.” [...]
Tim Barford, manager of Europe’s largest vegan events company, VegfestUK, has been vegan for three decades and points to the deeper roots of this recent explosion of interest. “There is a big plant-based shift culturally,” he says, “a systemic change in the way that we’re approaching food and the way that we feed ourselves. Remember that successive governments over 15 years have been ploughing money into persuading people to eat more fruit and vegetables, with the five-a-day campaign. Then you’ve got a real cultural change among millennials, which is very much built around justice and the way we look at animals.”
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