I trust when something is “vegan” to mean it’s vegan, but “plant-based” means I’m checking the ingredients list to confirm that they know what they’re saying.
I’ve been to enough restaurants that refer to something as “plant-based”, but they just mean the burger patty (served with cheese and a ranch-based sauce!).
A “meat-based” patty isn’t 100% meat either. There might me onions, flour, egg, salt, spices, etc. “plant-based” is a term that just tells you “most of it is noch meat” and so you have to check the ingredients making it a pretty useless term.
Also fuck everybody who makes a meat-alternative-food that isn’t vegan because they added 1% of some shit…
I’ve found that often “plant based” is a cop out and that companies that use it exclusively (so not only on the product, but also when you ask them outright if a product is suitable for vegans and they will only repeat “plant based”) often make no effort to ensure the product is actually vegan (so no effort to avoid cross contamination and no testing to ensure no animal products have ended up in the food), they just want the vegan £££ and count on most people not taking the time to look in to it, or not caring enough.
Plantastic and “meet free” Fridge Raiders are a couple of examples that come to mind (I have been in touch with both manufacturers and both are very careful to never confirm that their products are suitable for vegans despite them marketing them directly at us), and also Flash I think it was, that I’ve noticed have now changed their ad which used to say something like “made with A plant based ingredient” as if that makes the whole product plant based…
It’s a bit like greenwashing - wanting to make money off of the “green” market, without investing any money or effort to comply with the labelling rules.
To be fair I was told by a dietician that a lot of companies don’t use the vegan logo in the uk because in order to do so they must be certified by the vegan society (name?) which is expensive.
Sounded a bit like a troll toll.
There should be an industry standard “vegan friendly” or other such label that doesn’t require giving loads of money to an organisation to use.
The Vegan Society does do certifications for products which will let you use their logo. I’m not aware of any laws which would stop you from calling a product vegan without that certification, just can’t use their logo for it.
I can’t remember if it was the EU or ISO which was working on a standard to classify a product as vegan in the past couple of years. Though the last news I heard about it was that it was being led by agricultural lobby rather than animal rights activists.
I’m not sure wether that logo is really as expensive as they claim, but there are tons of products out there with kind of selfmade logos or at least a little text which reads “vegan”, “vegan friendly” or “suitable for a vegan diet”. Of course the official logo is the safe one, but as it’s still illegal to make misleading claims I guess one can trust 99% of those labels.
