Top 3 Reasons Why You Should be Serving Vegan Guests Today

If you’ve been following hospitality trends over the past several years, you may have already considered or started adding plant based options to your menus, with the aim to broaden your customer base to include guests you previously were not serving. If you’re not yet well versed on the benefits that vegan guests may bring to your business, keep reading.

In this blog, our CEO Meredith Marin answers two essential questions your company should be asking in 2021 and beyond:

1) Why should my company want to attract and serve vegan guests?

2) Why is now the right time to get started on this venture?

Vegan Food Service after working with our client Cuba’s Cookin’

Check out the top 3 reasons why you should be serving vegan guests today:

1) The Veto Vote - When there’s a group of people who want to go out to eat together, we often find that there is at least one vegan in the group. If you start asking around, you’ll find that everyone knows at least one vegan person these days! For example, you’ll find a family where the granddaughter is vegan, a work group where one colleague is vegan, or a group of friends where one friend is vegan. When this happens, we get this phenomenon called the “veto vote” where the one vegan ends up choosing where the entire group goes out to eat, because everyone in the group wants that vegan person to be served, so they end up defaulting to letting that person choose the dining location. Ensuring that your restaurant is vegan friendly (and visibly so, with on-menu options clearly marked and available on an online menu!) is the only way to overcome the veto vote. Consider a hotel where an entire family vacation is at stake, the loss is much greater when a family chooses your rival resort because they just introduce a new vegan menu.

2) Vegans have the potential to be your most loyal, grateful guests! This might surprise you: vegan customers are generally less critical of your food than any other guests. When you’re serving traditional customers, for example if you serve a steak, your steak is then going to be compared to all of the other steaks they ever had in their life and all of the other steaks they could have dined on in the neighborhood. Consider how many times a traditional customer sent back a steak because it wasn’t cooked to their liking. When a vegan customer sends back food, it’s almost always because it was prepared incorrectly, with non-vegan ingredients. Vegans trend toward sustainable values and hate food waste, so will only complain when absolutely necessary. When you’re attracting and serving vegan guests, they don’t have much to compare their meal to, because there aren’t several other versions of this same dish that they have access to. They are engaged in a unique experience of your creation of an on-theme menu dish that is a vegan version of your traditional offerings. If you execute your menu right, you’ve got a completely unique dish to share. Vegans are so grateful that they were able to eat at your establishment and the bar is being set by you and your ability to serve them. All you need to do is create something thoughtful and tasteful. Vegans give the best reviews online because they know how important it is to spread the word about good vegan options. This boosts staff morale tremendously. The chefs we have worked with to increase their vegan service get more requests to meet and greet customers who want to thank them than ever before. This is going to reinvigorate your staff’s commitment to customer service. It’s a wonderful, motivating experience for your staff to have this moment with new guests who are so grateful for being served.

There is this misconception in the service industry that vegan guests are difficult to serve. This is only happening at restaurants that are underprepared to serve vegan guests. In order to have a positive experience with vegan customers, your entire staff needs to be trained to understand the needs of these guests so they can best serve them.

3) Starting vegan friendly service now will make your future planning easier. Do you have a 5 year, 10 year, 20 year, 100 year plan for the future of your business? Do you want to leave a legacy? What do you imagine people will be serving in 10-20 to 50 years? Surveys project that the population will be eating largely plant based or “lab grown meat” in the future, and that’s something you’ll want to start planning for now. The longevity of your business depends on a transition plan to serving plan based and plant forward customers. Start planning now so you don’t fall behind when the population of plant based and plant forward eaters becomes so enormous that you’re not prepared to meet the demand. This is why we see major corporations and hospitality groups now testing products and having launches of various vegan meats and cheese so they can see what the market looks like and prepare to meet that growing demand early on. Your business’s future depends on your ability to get in on this early and be prepared to meet the future demand for plant based service, which is expected to continue to grow exponentially over the next 5-10 years.

if you found this helpful and would like to get started right away, we are now filling up our 2022 schedule with hospitality groups, restaurants, and resorts. We have consultants all over the world who would love to support your transition to vegan friendly service so you can attract and serve plant forward guests. You are invited o apply for a free 30 minute consultation with one of our consultants in your region.

Click Here to apply for a free consult.

Click Here to email Meredith Marin directly.