Why are Condimaniac products vegan when we, the founders, are not?

We always struggle a bit with this one - all our products are vegan and we do not process any animal products at our production site, however, we - Kier and Jen - are not vegans so some of the recipes we share contain animal products. 

We often worry that this might cause confusion as most brands either are vegan - everything they share is also vegan and they have vegan founders - or a business isn’t vegan, so they use animal products. 

Fitting into one of these categories would certainly make our marketing easier as we could position ourselves very clearly and leverage that angle in communications to acquire specific customers… The reason we’ve kept our products vegan is simple though: Inclusion. 

Whilst vegans can't have food with animal products, both omnivores and vegetarians can eat vegan food and to be honest, most condiments are vegan by default. We don’t let it compromise on the quality of anything either, so it’s really for everyone!

I (Jen) was vegan for just under a year in 2014 and loved it, but I couldn’t quite keep it up, so I’ve gone back to being pescatarian, which I’ve been since 2008. Kier is probably what you’d call a flexitarian - he was fully vegetarian for about 2 years a few years ago and now eats about 90% vegetarian with some meat when out and about. We hold the belief that lots of people doing changes imperfectly is more beneficial than a small amount of people doing it perfectly. And it’s probably not controversial to say that everyone at least reducing their consumption of meat would be beneficial to health, climate and more - so whilst we aren’t here to try and evangelise anyone, I guess you could call this part of our ideology as a business. 

So really we mostly just share what we genuinely eat and how we use our products - we always try and make the recipes work for any diet by letting you know that you can substitute meat for mock meats or leave out certain ingredients to veganise it. The nice thing is that by keeping products plant-based we automatically cater for some common allergy sufferers - like lactose and eggs.

What we also hope to achieve is to normalise vegan products for everyone. You don’t have to be vegan to enjoy animal product free food and as a vegan, you don’t have to compromise on flavour - we got you!

So if you ever wondered about any of this, I hope you found this answer satisfying. If not, just hit reply and let us know your thoughts!

Xoxo

Jen