For anyone who has tried buying vegan products in a supermarket, I’m sure this will be a familiar experience. You find some delicious looking product on a supermarket shelf, it’s labelled ‘suitable for vegetarians’, but it’s not clear whether it’s vegan-friendly too, so you begin searching through the ingredients list. All is going well until, right at the very bottom, you read the word ‘honey’.
Of course, it could just as easily be ‘vitamin D3′ or ‘shellac’ or any number of other animal-derived ingredients. The point is, imagine how much easier it would be if all supermarket own-brand products that are suitable for vegans were clearly labelled. You could just pick up an item and know immediately whether it was suitable for you or not. That’s the goal behind Animal Aid’s new Mark It Vegan campaign, which is calling on all UK supermarkets that don’t already do so to label their vegan-friendly own-brand goods.
At present only Sainsbury’s, the Co-op and Marks & Spencer label their animal-free products, the rest do so only sporadically or not at all. So, if you’d like to see vegan labelling in stores such as Tesco, Iceland, Aldi and the others, please sign our online petition and share it on social media. Whilst you’re at it, you can also order some of our campaign postcards and ask your friends and family to sign them too.
Struggling to find vegan products in supermarkets is one of the biggest problems faced by new vegans, so this simple measure would help to make going vegan easier and more appealing. And the more people who go vegan, the fewer animals have to suffer and die to produce our food.