Workplace Veganuary Campaign Shows Success And Sustainability
Beyond its positive impact on animal welfare, eating veg*n is better for our health and the planet. The question then remains: what kinds of initiatives, programs, or policy changes might encourage people to choose plant-based? Previous research suggests increasing the proportional availability of plant-based products could work, as well as highlighting plant-based options on menus. Although helpful in the short term, few of those approaches were shown to leave consumers making plant-based choices after six months.
Animal advocates are likely familiar with Veganuary, an annual nonprofit campaign that challenges people to try a vegan lifestyle for the month of January. Veganuary has gained steam over time: in 2022, 629,000 people registered worldwide, with 10 times that number estimated to have participated unofficially.
Veganuary In The Workplace? One U.K.-Based Catering Company’s Approach
Over 100 workplaces around the world have also started encouraging their employees to participate in Veganuary and providing more vegan meal options. However, there isn’t much research on the effectiveness of these workplace campaigns. A group of researchers wanted to measure how an annual Veganuary campaign, run by a large catering company in the U.K. from 2019 to 2022, influenced employees to choose veg*n meals at work.
The campaign consisted of increasing the availability and visibility of veg*n meals. During the campaign period, the company introduced and promoted new plant-based meals in their workplace cafeterias, advertising their environmental and health benefits.
The researchers analyzed over five years of sales data from 36 locations across five businesses in the United Kingdom. They wanted to see if each annual Veganuary campaign increased veg*n meal sales, measuring units sold across the branches and as a proportion of total meals each week. Their analysis model allowed them to observe the contributions of each year’s campaign over time.
Cafeteria Campaign Led To More Plant-Based Sales
The campaign influenced employees to buy veg*n meals, with positive effects lasting well beyond January in some years.
Pre-Campaign Baseline
The researchers measured the percentage of veg*n meals sold in 2017 and 2018, before the company’s first Veganuary campaign. During this period, less than 2% of meals sold were vegan and a little over 12% were vegetarian. The researchers compared the effects of each year’s campaign to this baseline period.
Increase In Vegan Sales
Each year in 2020, 2021, and 2022, the campaign raised the proportion of vegan meals sold by around 2 percentage points. This resulted in vegan meals accounting for, at their highest points, 3.5 to 4% of overall meal sales after each campaign.
While this doesn’t seem like a lot, vegan meals originally made up a very small share (less than 2%) of overall meal sales. Looking at percentage increase reveals a more accurate representation of growth: depending on the year, the campaign led to an impressive 86 to 113% increase in vegan meal sales.
Increase In Vegetarian Sales
The campaign raised the proportion of vegetarian meals sold by around 3 percentage points in 2019 and 2021 and 10 percentage points in 2022. This resulted in vegetarian meals accounting for, at their highest points, 15 to 22% of overall meal sales after each campaign. This corresponds to percentage increases of 26%, 23%, and 79% in those same years, with the 2022 campaign being particularly influential.
The percentage increase in vegetarian meal sales was smaller than that of vegan meal sales, likely because more people were already eating vegetarian before the campaign.
Two Years Had No Effect
Interestingly, the 2019 campaign didn’t have an effect on vegan meal sales and the 2020 campaign didn’t influence vegetarian meal sales.
A Launch With A Legacy?
Some years of the campaign had a medium-term impact on employee meal choices. The 2020 and 2021 campaigns influenced some people to continue choosing vegan meals into 2022. For vegetarian meal sales, the 2019 campaign’s positive effects lingered until early 2020 and the 2021 campaign lasted until later that year. Although it had a larger initial effect, the 2022 campaign’s influence on vegetarian meal sales faded fairly quickly, underscoring that each year had a different level of impact.
Every Cafeteria Might Tell A Different Story
These observations reflect combined data from all 36 workplaces. When the authors examined one workplace at random, the results didn’t match those stated above. At that cafeteria, the campaign didn’t have an effect on vegan sales in any year and only had an effect on vegetarian sales in 2019.
What’s Next For Expanding Veganuary
While the impact of this Veganuary initiative, including its persistence, varied across years and workplaces, the evidence suggests that the campaign was successful overall in increasing veg*n meal sales.
Other Veganuary campaigns could be more or less successful than the one described here. The authors acknowledged that they only studied a select number of cafeterias in the U.K., which were all served by the same catering company. These cafeterias mostly served blue-collar workers, so a similar campaign might have a different impact in another country or at workplaces serving more white-collar workers. Also, the researchers excluded cafeterias with lots of missing data from the study, so the results don’t paint a full picture.
Besides the general strategy of the Veganuary campaign, the authors couldn’t explain what exactly may have caused differences in success between years and workplaces — for example, why 2022 caused a larger spike in vegetarian meal sales or why one cafeteria’s results were so different from the overall findings. They didn’t know much about the details of this specific campaign or how strictly it was implemented in each cafeteria. Also, increased availability of plant-based meals and promotion worked together in this campaign, making it difficult to determine to what extent each part influenced people’s behavior. Still, the results of this campaign suggest that Veganuary campaigns are possible to implement and can influence people to try a plant-based lifestyle.
Veganuary is a welcoming and low-pressure introduction for people to try a plant-based lifestyle that’s better for animals, health, and the environment. However, as this campaign demonstrated, results varied from workplace to workplace and from year to year. Therefore, animal advocates can operate with flexibility, open-mindedness, and aim to meet people where they are in their journey to veg*nism.
Understanding that some people may be motivated by more than animal welfare, advocates could emphasize how similar campaigns might benefit different people. For example, a Veganuary campaign could be a way for businesses to have a positive environmental impact and uphold any climate and sustainability commitments. Because of its low cost and relatively simple implementation, public institutions like hospitals, schools, or universities might also find this approach appealing. In an era heavily influenced by social media marketing, exposure to veg*n options in everyday, in-person settings could have a meaningful impact on the transition to plant-based lifestyles.
https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2023.27