Why Don't Some Food Manufacturers Label Their Food/Drink as Vegetarian/Vegan

nanook5

Good day to all

I often find myself asking this question with the likes of Nestlé, Coca Cola and Tesco etc

For instance I stopped drinking Coke when I became vegetarian because I was false informed by the internet that it may have had traces of fish gelatin in it,but only recently I found out that I can still drink it,but I guess I saved my body a lot of sugar over the years

I was the same with the likes of "Jelly Tots" until I found out they were Vegan through boards.

Of course being misinformed is partly my fault but if this info was on the bottle/packet itself it would actually have earned these companies more money .

Nestlé and Coke have the relative information on their websites , but would it be THAT hard or costly for them to just write the words "Suitable for Vegetarians/Vegans" on their labels?

Tesco obviously do a good job at labeling all their own brand products vegetarian if they are,but would it do them any harm to label vegan products as vegan ??

Any comments ?

Tar.Aldarion

I'm really not sure, products seem to have an aversion to something that would boost their sales.
Especially vegan things, practically nothing says it is vegan, even if it says it is vegetarian.


In India it is mandatory to say if something is veg*n or not, wouldn't mind that here.
It gets annoying in other countries too where ingredients often aren't even in English.

--LOS--

I'd say sometimes because of factory cross contamination concerns, it is harder to label something vegan, green and blacks don't label their dark chocolate vegan anymore even though I would consider it is.

Do you think companies fear labelling because it highlights veganism/vegetarianism too much, they don't want people to stop buying non veggie/vegan products? I don't know if it even goes that far tbh, you have to assume they only think in terms of profit.

From what I hear from my sister the uk stores seem to be much better at labelling vegan. Marks and spencers do. I noticed pringles do. Most of the time I just read the ingredients first because I don't expect a vegan label but then I notice it afterwards (an odd time).

You could write to some stores and ask them I guess because it's also something they're probably not so aware of yet, the UK carries more veggie and vegan products so naturally they are better at labelling.

Peanut

Yeah the UK is much more veg-friendly in terms of labelling, even with restaurant & fast-food menus.

I think there are a number of different reasons manufacturers don't label, but I would suspect that one of the biggest would be that they want to hedge their bets, e.g. If they start labelling something veg., then later change the ingredients for some reason, they could face a backlash. This happened to Nestle even when they weren't labelling it directly on the products (as far as I know).

Alternatively, labelling some of their products as veg. friendly might inadvertently highlight other products in their range which aren't.

--LOS--

^ ye that's very true, just came across this story...... https://www.change.org/p/woolworths-australia-make-a-donation-to-edgar-s-mission-on-behalf-of-every-carton-of-select-soy-milk-that-was-sold-while-falsely-labeled-as-being-suitable-for-vegans

Recently, after consumer questioning, it was revealed that Woolworths Select Regular Soy Milk contained animal derived D3.