Creating demand for vegan products

[Kerry Baker]

I was doing an Internet search to see if there are such things as vegan building materials for house construction.  I came across this site;

http://fitvegan4life.tumblr.com/post/18396925380/i-see-this-graphic...

It occurs to me that being vegan is a Catch 22 issue.  People don't ask for vegan products because it doesn't occur to them that building materials, for example glues, may contain animal products.  But unless people start demanding vegan products the options will remain largely unsuitable for the vegan lifestyle.

Perhaps a website that does take people through alternative options for things like building materials could start a greater demand for cruelty free products.  The slow pace of change has been commented on in other discussions and blogs on this site.  I'm wondering if there may be a way to firstly get something on the Net and secondly to make sure it comes up on the first page when people use a search engine to find suppliers of goods and services.

A huge task, perhaps can be done along industry lines, but it might start people becoming aware of how much animal products are unnecessarily used in manufacturing that can be replaced by equally effective goods.

Having said that, I have absolutely no IT skills and wouldn't have a clue where to start.  I wonder if AR Zone people may be able to collectively do something by using the community to research and build websites? 

This may be unrealistic, but I'd be interested to see what others think.

[Wendy J Cleaver]

I think its a great idea but..............I do not have any IT skills either and  it will cost money to put such a site together but once it is up and running one could get vegan friendly companies to advertise to support the site.

[Kerry Baker]

Thanks Wendy.  I guess first of all it would be necessary to anticipate what products people may want to search for.  I think clothing, footwear, personal products and cleaning products are reasonably available and people are aware.  It's the other things that one wouldn't necessarily think of, such as car tyres for example, that come to mind.  Maybe the better way to go thinking about it would be to encourage the ones that are vegan friendly to advertise the fact on their websites and raise awareness that way?  Michelin apparently don't use any animal products for their tyres but who'd know.  That may be more effective at getting out to buyers of products and less costly.  It will mean that vegans need to be asking manufacturers to do this, or at least writing emails and asking if their products are vegan friendly.  Maybe that's the way to go.

[Natalia]

I think it is a great idea, I had this exact same idea about food, where I live, most people don't even know what a vegan is, you go to a restaurant ask for a salad without animal products and they bring you one with egg and tuna in it. I wanted to create a site to put all vegan safe products from supermarkets and also start contacting restaurants explaining about veganism and whether they have dishes that would be suitable for vegans, even invite them to create one.

As it is, the only way to have a decent meal away from home is to go to a vegan restaurants (there's a grand total of two in my city, a major capital), even vegetarian restaurants have decided, for some reason, that since they don't use meat of fish almost every dish needs to have cheese, yogurt, cream or eggs, I don't understand it...

Also Soy milk, it is important to ask for it instead of assuming they won't have it, which they probably won't but maybe they'll start considering about stocking it?

So, we keep going to safe places because there are no options and there'll never be options because we don't ask for them.

[Kate✯GO VEGAN+NOBODY GETS HURT Ⓥ]

http://www.vegansociety.com/afssearch.aspx

[Natalia]

Yes I know the vegan society, but they only operate in the UK, don't they? I don't know what would be necessary to set up something like that here...I'll get in touch with them.

[Kerry Baker]

It seems to me that where there is demand that supply will follow.  Maybe one thing we can do is to start vegans being a bit more proactive and specifying they need to ensure that products have no animal content.  Apart from the Leaping Bunny emblem, there really isn't a universal sign for vegan that I know of.  Some products in the alternative health area have a V to indicate vegetarian, but I have noticed a lot of products for example that used to be in vege-caps are now in the standard gelatine capsules. 

Natalia, I wonder if it might be worthwhile you placing an advertisement in a main newspaper for like-minded people to contact you with a view to starting up something where you are?  Hopefully you'd attract people with a range of skills who could help with things like a Spanish Vegan Society.  I hope so, I'd love to try Spanish vegan food.  BTW are you a member of the Vegan Recipes group on this site?

I will make an attempt to contact some different industries ad find out what is involved.

[Natalia]

I'll check out the group I didn't know it existed, haven't had much chance to see everything that's here yet but will do.

[Jacob Edward]

Hello, I know this post is over three years old, but worth a shot just to see if anybody is still following... I have IT skills that could help with a website, which btw, would be a great idea since after doing some research on how to build my own Vegan house, there's essentially nothing that has already been documented... let me know if you would like to collaborate :-)

[Kerry Baker]

Hi Jacob. Thanks for your post and the idea of a website sounds intriguing. I am interested to know how you conceptualise this might work. I think it would be great to have somewhere for vegans to go to find products.

Coincidentally I am planning in the next few years to look at getting a piece of land further out of Melbourne and using it as a release site for rehabilitated wildlife. I am looking at options for a home, so this comes at a good time for me personally. I assume there will be a demand if we can do it, so let me know how you think this might be approached.

[Jacob Edward]

I was thinking a wiki-like site would be a good idea (allowing others to contribute directly to the site with community collaboration over the quality of the content)...  Parts of the site would not only be for detailing construction materials but perhaps even construction processes and how they personally made decisions for this Vegan material over that one... not sure if this site worldveganorganization.org would be interested in something like that, I contacted them yesterday to offer my help with building their site and I'm still waiting to hear back.  Not sure if you've ever been on the reprap wiki, but essentially it's where different 3D printers have all of their details documented (but also has generalized pages for the different materials/ideas so that individuals can get a good overview without having to read through each design) which is an invaluable resource for DIY's, same idea with what I'm thinking...  Also, the idea of a wiki would be great for spontaneous growth, if there was a Vegan who wanted to start a wiki on some unrelated topic to construction, like Veganizing transportation or something, they could do so without the need of top down management and still have their topic in a central location for others to use and build up.

I think there's a very high likely hood that worldveganorganization.com wont be interested or wont respond so we should definitely look into a seperate website, both veganwiki.com and veganwiki.org seem to be taken but not active, perhaps they would be willing to sell it, if not, I'll look into alternatives.

Btw, not sure if you were aware of just how ridiculous these domain prices are, but someone bought the veganfoodwiki.com domain and is charging $2,244 for it... it's almost as if someone doesn't want that domain to be active or something...

VeganWiki.club is $10 and VeganWiki.directory is $18

[Jacob Edward]

Just bought veganwikis.com

[Kerry Baker]

Sounds great Jacob. I think if it's a Wiki where others contribute there is likely to be some issues around people who oppose vegans putting non-vegan things in. So we need to actually insist they post the proof as well, something from the manufacturers website etc.

I'll give some thought to what we need to do to start getting products posted. It would be a fantastic resource for vegans trying to live the vegan life.