2019 Will Be the Most Vegan Year Yet and Brands Know It
Veganism was always going to be a big topic for January 2019. In the spirit our start-of-year best intentions to live healthier, more fulfilling lives, the concept of Veganuary - giving up meat and animal products for the month of January - seems to have cemented itself as one of the go-to new year challenges, alongside the temporary sobriety of Dry January. In 2018, 183% more people officially signed up on the Veganuary website than the previous year and if you look at Google’s trend analysis, 2019 is going to smash that record.
But what we weren’t expecting from January 2019 was that the brand dominating the inevitable conversations around eating a plant-based diet would be a British bakery chain established in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and one of the most prolific distributors of meat-filled pastry products, from steak bakes to sausage rolls: Greggs.
When Greggs launched its vegan sausage roll on January 2nd via a video spoofing an iPhone-style product launch, the internet population opened wide and took a big, crumbly bite.
In this moment Greggs joined a list of brands making pro-vegan moves that continues to include more and more mass-market names. In the US a few months back, burger chain White Castle made plant-based Impossible sliders available in every single outlet (with the help of Wu-Tang Clan, naturally). Impossible Foods’ executive creative director Sasha Markova saw this as a historic move. “It meant that plant based food wasn’t just a luxury for the coasts but now available to everyone,” she says.
January is like Christmas for plant-based brands like Impossible, so naturally they’ve also had a big announcement this month, launching their new product - the Impossible Burger 2.0. It’s been received with delight, even winning ‘Best of CES’ at the tech conference last week. Sasha sees this as a big moment. “A tech show celebrating a food product as the most innovative and impactful product shows you the way this is going,” she says.
To date the Greggs Twitter video has had over 5.2 million views, but its popularity extends beyond an online phenomenon - the company is struggling to meet demand across the UK. The snack originally launched in 950 stores nationwide, but they’re still not easy to come by as they’ve been selling out so quickly.
“We always knew that the Vegan Sausage Roll would be a welcomed addition to our menu,” says Fiona Mills, brand communications manager at Greggs. “However, the reaction to it has been somewhat overwhelming. Needless to say we were always prepared that our Vegan Sausage Roll might not please everyone, including Piers!”
She’s referring, of course, to Good Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan, who jumped straight in with an unsolicited opinion, tweeting: “Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns.” Within minutes, Greggs had replied: “Oh hello Piers, we've been expecting you.” And thus began the first great social media slanging match of the year. Vegans rejoiced. Others felt somehow wronged by the introduction of a product they had no obligation to buy.
Many have commended Gregg’s playful social media responses. The original thread is an absolute schooling in how to navigate through a Twitter storm. “We pride ourselves on being a brand with a real personality, sometimes a little cheeky,” says Fiona. “Which is why our social responses have been gaining attention. Despite taking our products seriously, we don’t always take ourselves too seriously and we think our audience enjoy that.”
But although Greggs worked with Splendid Communications and Havas PR to make sure the new product made the right kind of splash, it was more than just a PR stunt. The brand seems to be committed to this change. “The launch of the product followed high demand from customers,” says Fiona. “Following a PETA petition last year (signed by 20,000 people) and we wanted to create a launch befitting of this cultural moment.
“We understand that vegan (and vegetarian) diets are of growing importance to many people, whether that be for moral or health reasons, or indeed both. We know there has been a lot of customer demand for Greggs to produce a Vegan Sausage Roll. What’s more, research has shown that vegans struggle to find tasty savoury snacks. As a leading food-on-the-go retailer that believes in putting customers at the heart of everything we do, we want to offer more tasty vegan friendly options and our product development team have been working hard behind the scenes to do just that.
“We wanted to launch it in January (Veganuary) when there’s a bigger demand from customers for vegan friendly, food on-the-go savoury products. We also wanted to be able to create a moment in time, as Greggs launching a Vegan Sausage Roll is a big deal – it’s a sign in 2019 that veganism is now mainstream.”
Even the most international of brands are using the new year as an opportunity to capitalise on that vegan dollar too. McDonald's just launched a breaded red pesto goujon wrap - the first vegan option ever in its Happy Meal range. Of course Piers had something to say about this too, tweeting: “Oh FFS. It's supposed to be a HAPPY meal,” giving another social media manager the chance for some inter-brand solidarity: “Like our pals at the sausage roll place, we’ve been expecting you. Don’t worry Piers, you can still get McNuggets in your Happy Meal! 👍” Pizza Hut started offering a vegan range back in 2017 and this month built on that by launching a cheesy vegan jackfruit pizza. And Ben and Jerry’s has added a new non-dairy ice cream flavour to its collection - Coconutterly Caramel’d.
Brands know there’s been an awakening out there. Sasha attributes it to our unprecedented ability to educate ourselves about how our food is produced: “Once you understand how the modern food system works – how much waste it uses, the damage it does to our health and to the planet, and the lack of compassion it involves, how can you be part of it? Especially when all these amazing delicious alternatives are being invented on a day-by-day basis. A year ago, nobody knew what oat milk was, now it’s sold out everywhere. I think a switch literally gets flipped in somebody when they start to really understand where their food comes from. It’s like The Wire. You start to connect the dots and it becomes very undesirable to be part of that system. I remember ASAP Rocky telling our creative director, Giselle, that he was plant based because he didn’t want to contribute to such a bad system.”
So is 2019 the year of the vegan? All of this news is a sign that change is coming to the way people eat and it’s moving faster than we could have predicted. Impossible makes it the company’s mission to take animals out of the food product chain by 2035 by making the most delicious meat from plants. “When we used to say that a year ago, people would look at us like we were on acid,” says Sasha. “Now it doesn’t seem too outlandish an idea anymore. For us, this idea isn’t about brands or trends – it is what Steve Jobs used to call ‘an inevitable.’ A plant-based world is the way we are going – it is an idea bigger than all of us - and nothing can stop it. I really don’t think it’s just about 2019 being the year of veganism - this will be the century of it.”
