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UK supermarket Tesco has confirmed to Plant Based News that it is launching a ready-to-eat vegan sausage roll next week – and has revealed some more details.
A spokesperson told PBN that the roll will be available from the instore bakeries of 624 stores nationwide from Monday April 22.
Called the Tesco Meat Free Sausage Roll it will retail for 75p. The official product description says it is ‘puff pastry filled with a soy-based Lincolnshire style sausage, seasoned with sage and onion’.
Vegan sausage roll
The news was initially revealed on Instagram by Accidentally Vegan UK, which said it could not reveal its source, but shared an image with details of the product from the store’s file, which is used by employees working in the bakery.
Accidentally Vegan UK speculated that Tesco was ‘inspired by the Greggs effect’ – referencing the high street bakery’s hotly debated launch of its vegan sausage roll earlier this year.
The vegan sausage roll was launched on January 3 in 900 stores, attracting huge amounts of attention in the media, as well as becoming the center of a celebrity row featuring Piers Morgan, who pretended to vomit after sampling the roll on television. The snack was so popular, it later rolled out to all of Greggs’ 1,850 stores across the UK.
Surprise success
“It’s taken us by surprise quite how much excitement it has created,” Roger Whiteside, Chief Executive at Greggs, said: “We’re not giving out numbers – it’s in the hundreds of thousands – but it is the fastest selling new product we have launched in six years. It’s literally flying off the shelves.
“We didn’t know if it would sell or not. Now we know it’s selling out we need to get it out there. The priority is to get it into existing shops, and then the other shops who didn’t get it will get it. We are pulling out all the stops to get it out there as quickly as possible.”
