Beautiful peeps! I hope you are all doing great and have survived the holiday period (and maybe enjoyed it, too!). I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed this time as I had a few days off from work and oh my, I needed it: the last months of 2021 had been quite demanding at work and hadn’t managed to get a proper balance in my personal life, so getting almost 10 days off had been fabulous. A lot of relaxing and recharging, much needed. It has been also a good time to catch up with some reading and researching and I am going to share with you the fruits of such research!

Today I wanted to expand a bit on what I was writing about in my last post, where I was referring to the Veganuary website suggesting to use certain foods and ingredients as substitutes for their non-vegan counterparts, while they are owned by big multinational corporations such as Coca Cola, Unilever, etc. that are really not vegan nor have animal and environment welfare as part of their principles.

An example, is the Alpro brand. Oooft! I know, it is everywhere, it is convenient and it has a wide variety of non-dairy products. Unfortunately, Alpro is owned by Danone, a massive multinational company with a focus on dairy products (it literally started as a yoghurt producer).

Similarly, the successful oat milk brand, Oatly, has been recently purchased by The Blackstone Group, an investment management group: its CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman has shares in companies connected to deforestation in the Amazon (you can read a bit more here and here).

Another popular plant-based milk brand that is owned by a parent company to a multinational is Plenish, which has been acquired by Britvic, which “holds the franchises for producing and bottling Pepsi Cola and 7Up in the United Kingdom“.

Other brands that are not independent:

• Rude Health (PepsiCo.);
• Provamel (Danone);
• Soya Soleil (Danone).
  

These are just few of the most popular brands that are taking over the vegan and dairy-free market of milk substitutes.

You might find this frustrating because these brands are easy to find and fairly cheap, and now you might wonder if there can be alternatives to these plant-based milks, as it seems that as soon as a brand becomes just a bit more available, any of the multinationals want a bite of them! Well, don’t despair! There are plenty of smaller and independent plant-based milk brands that are fairly easy to find and still maintain their ethical essence.

Among these are (and no, I am not sponsored by any of them):

• Mighty Pea;
• Plamil;
• Ecomil;
• Good Hemp;
• Isola Bio;
• Minor Figures (although I am afraid of where they are heading with their big expanse in the U.S. market).

The good thing about these smaller/independent businesses (at least in theory and from what they advertise), is that they use fewer and more genuine ingredients and it is easier to hold them accountable for what they are doing.

I am going to keep a watchful eye on the situation and will keep you updated with any changes.

It’s all for today, my beautiful kittens!

TVCL xx