Sentient Today

There is an Amazon for vegans, and it’s helping to define what we’re calling the new vegan marketplace. Built on the belief that reliable product descriptions and affordable prices are the most important factors for the growing community of vegans shopping online, this new vegan marketplace delivers to your front door.

Billion Vegans is jumping at the opportunity for growth proven by the plant-based food industry, this time with a special, vegan-everything twist. The online marketplace carries 4,500 vegan products—from Clif Bars to kid’s shoes—that it certifies itself.

Sadly, not all products that claim to be vegan are actually vegan, especially from second-party retailers like Amazon. For Billion Vegans, giving products their own vegan stamp was a must.

The company has already raised $300,000 in private investments on the heels of a vegan online shopping industry worth $30 billion in the United States, according to Billion Vegans co-founder Alon Hochberg.

“These numbers show there’s a tremendous business opportunity,” Hochberg told VegNews. “We’re already seeing mainstream companies and investors taking advantage of the growth in the plant-based sector. We want the vegan community to also have the chance to be part of it.”

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1. ✊ We’re not done talking about Prop 12 yet, folks. So far, the campaign for “Yes on 12” has received nearly $13 million in funding support from the likes of the Open Philanthropy Action Fund, among others. The campaign for “No on 12” has received about $500,000 from one source, the Humane Farming Action Fund. [KCRA]
2. 🤖 Apparently, a $40,000 three-wheeled robot is less erratic in front of animals than humans are. Cargill started using this 450-pound machine to move cattle, which sounds nice and humane and all, but let’s not forget that the best animal welfare practices happen outside the realm of animal agriculture. [Star Tribune]
3. 📊 $250 billion by 2022: The global food tech industry is forecasted to skyrocket. Leading the way are door-delivery giants like GrubHub and DoorDash, along with a slew of fast food chains and smaller retailers like Billion Vegans catching on to the home delivery trend. [Forbes]
4. 👀 Trump’s new NAFTA agreement isn’t performing as he’d hoped. Tariffs are still getting in the way, and agribusiness is suffering. The U.S. usually exports about $2 billion in dairy products to Canada and Mexico, accounting for up to 40% of export sales, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Here's where the industry stands since the agreement was signed. [CNBC]
5. 🌱 Spain opened its first vegan pizza school. Huh?! Yup, the country that has more pigs than people finally said no to pepperoni. [Vegan Gastronomy]

Read This Book

Yet another gem of food science from Marion Nestle—author of Food Politics and What to Eat—in Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat (Basic 2018). Exploring food and its power structures, this cautionary tale explains why we should think twice before believing what food companies tell us is in the food we eat.

When it comes to crookedness, the food industry is frighteningly equatable to the drug industry. It has a systemic problem. Research is molded and mashed together to give companies the results they want. They court investigators and nutrition professional, stack the deck, cover their butts and run. Soon enough, a systemic problem becomes a personal, ethical dilemma.

Bad food science is now a public health crisis. But there are folks out their, like the KIND fruit-and-nut bar company, that are working to make things better. KIND pledged $25 million over 10 years to “improve public health by making truth, transparency, and integrity the foremost values in today’s food system.” And it just so happens that the author of this book was one of KIND’s first picks to help!

Bottom line: Read this book if you want the tools to recognize bad food science and protect yourself from it. Unsavory Truth is full of honest, hard-fought learnings like, “Everyone eats. Food matters.”