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An online vegan retailer has shipped a staggering 70,000 packages since March – revealing that business has boomed amid the coronavirus lockdown.
The Vegan Kind, an online supermarket and subscription box service founded by husband and wife team Scott and Karris McCulloch, is reporting ‘exponential growth thanks to the boom in the the vegan lifestyle during lockdown’.
The company had to move to a warehouse with treble the floor space in a bid to meet the growing demand for vegan products, as well as create 21 new jobs.
‘No way to predict it’
In a statement sent to Plant Based News, The Vegan Kind co-founder Scott McCulloch said: “Like most companies around the UK, there was no way we could have predicted the impact that Covid-19 was going to have on our business. But fortunately for us, it’s allowed us to grow much quicker than we ever thought possible.
“We didn’t plan on moving warehouse again so quickly after our last move, but after forecasting the festive period, we quickly realised that the business couldn’t have coped with any more increased demand in its current premises.
“The new warehouse is huge and will allow us to process so many more orders. We don’t plan on moving now for the next five years at least – but never say never.”
Future plans
Following its recent major growth, the company is now predicting forecasting an annual turnover of almost £6,000,000.
Over the next couple of years, The Vegan Kind plans to ‘snowball its recent successes with an investment round led by PWC Raise’.
It also has plans to launch its own line of vegan ready meals in the pipeline.
Vegan Boom
The Vegan Kind is not alone in seeing a surge in plant-based sales over the coronavirus lockdown period: other businesses have reported similar increases.
Recipe box company Mindful Chef recently revealed that U.K sales of vegan recipe boxes surged by a staggering 345 percent since lockdown began, based on year on year sales data.
In a statement sent to Plant Based News, Giles Humphries, co-founder of Mindful Chef said the company has seen a shift in consumer awareness around the food we consume over the past five years.
Choosing a vegan diet, he said, or simply eating more plant-based meals ‘has become increasingly popular and this is a trend we’ve seen grow significantly during lockdown’.
Humphries revealed that three-quarters of Mindful Chef’s customers choose to include at least one vegan meal in their recipe box order, saying it is ‘great to see people embracing plant-based eating’. The company plans to continue growing its vegan options.
U.S sees plant-based surge
According to sales data, a similar picture is emerging in the U.S, with a poll conducted by market research firm OnePoll suggesting that more than half (60 percent) of Americans have started eating a more plant-based diet since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
According to the polling, nearly six in 10 have found themselves ‘transitioning to a more flexitarian, or semi-vegetarian, diet’, citing health as their top reason for making the change since the pandemic began.
“Nearly 60 percent of respondents in the national general population survey said they ‘strongly agree’ or ‘somewhat agree’ when asked whether their eating habits were increasingly shifting to plant-based, with 39 percent of participants 18-25 years old and 23 percent of participants 26-41 years old stating that their diet already excludes animal products,” said a statement sent to Plant Based News.
