Foodservice Still Fails Vegan Customers Despite Plant-Based Growth

Vegan advocates highlight ongoing challenges in foodservice, noting that many restaurants fail to meet vegan needs despite years of industry progress.

Naomi Jardine is the founder of Your Vegan Customer, a UK initiative that helps restaurants, cafés and pubs understand and welcome vegan diners. Vegan for more than ten years, she has eaten out across the UK and beyond, and created the Vegan Customer Standard and the Vegan Champion review programme to give independent hospitality businesses a practical benchmark. In this guest post, Naomi argues that foodservice is where many plant-based customers are still being let down, and explains the low-cost fixes that venues can make. The plant-based sector has spent years and enormous sums persuading people to choose vegan food. Retail shelves show the results. Yet when those same customers walk into a restaurant, café or pub, the experience often falls apart. I’ve been vegan for over a decade, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been offered a side salad as a main course, charged extra for oat milk, or met a blank look when I asked whether the gravy contains butter. These aren’t rare failures at bad venues. They happen at good, busy, well-run places that simply haven’t seen their menu from a vegan’s side of the table. That matters far more than many operators realise, because of what is often called the vegan veto. When a group of friends, family or colleagues chooses where to eat, the person with the most limited options usually decides. If one venue has nothing for them, the whole table books somewhere else. A weak vegan offer doesn’t just lose one cover; it can lose six. In my experience, most disappointing meals come down to the same handful of issues. None of them needs a separate kitchen or a fully vegan menu to fix. Treating one dish as choice. A single vegan main, often the same risotto or curry for years, gives regulars no reason to return. Two mains is the minimum that feels like a real menu. Labelling that leaves people guessing. Without a clear VG key on menus, specials boards and allergen charts, vegans either quiz the staff about every dish or give up and go elsewhere. Hidden animal ingredients. Butter in the mash, honey in the dressing, egg wash on the bread, fish sauce in the stir-fry. Kitchens often know; front-of-house often doesn’t. The plant milk surcharge. Charging 40p or 50p extra for oat milk is one of the most common complaints vegan customers raise. It earns very little and signals that vegans are an inconvenience. Staff who aren’t briefed. Confusing vegan with vegetarian, or guessing rather than checking, quickly erodes trust. Equally, an honest “the chips share a fryer with fish” is a perfectly good answer, because it lets the customer decide. To give independent venues something practical to aim for, I developed the Vegan Customer Standard. It places a venue on one of four levels: Vegan-tolerant: one option, often a salad, that nobody really planned for. Vegan-aware: a few labelled options and staff who can check. Vegan Welcome: real choice, fair pricing and knowledgeable staff. Vegan Champion: vegan dishes so good that non-vegans order them too. Venues are assessed across seven pillars: choice, clarity, confidence, creativity, fairness, candour and completeness. The last of these is easy to overlook. A good vegan main loses its value if there is no vegan dessert, sauce or drink to go with it, and the table asks for the bill early. The standard is deliberately written from the customer’s side of the table rather than the kitchen’s. Certification schemes for hotels and large groups do valuable work, but most UK restaurants, cafés and pubs are small independents. They need quick wins they can make this week, not a lengthy audit process. Those quick wins are cheap: a VG key, dropping the plant milk charge, a one-page staff briefing, a second vegan main and one good dessert. The return can be significant, because vegan customers are unusually loyal to places that get it right and quick to recommend them. Vegan diners share good finds constantly, and we encourage them to give constructive feedback too; our Vegan Eating-Out Toolkit includes a template for doing exactly that. For plant-based brands, foodservice is where trial often happens. Someone tries a vegan dish in a pub with friends, enjoys it, and goes on to buy plant-based at home. A bad experience works in reverse: a dry, overpriced afterthought on a menu reinforces every stereotype the sector has worked to overcome. That makes everyday hospitality one of the most important and least discussed parts of the plant-based story. Brands, suppliers and distributors that sell into foodservice can help by giving venues more than products: clear ingredient information, menu ideas and the confidence to talk about vegan dishes properly. The good news is that the gap is small. Most venues are a handful of changes away from being somewhere vegans actively choose, and somewhere their friends happily follow. The vegan in the group already has the deciding vote. The question is whether hospitality gives them a reason to use it…

Read source: Vegconomist