How Vegan Entrepreneurs Are Reshaping Business

By Angela Crawford, Ph.D.

When people shift to a vegan lifestyle, they discover a greater sense of meaning and purpose, ranging from personal fulfillment of living aligned with values to creating businesses that help to promote these values.

Trends on LinkedIn, the largest professional online network, highlight the growing number of vegan businesses, organizations, and professionals who are expressing their purpose in the plant-based realm. At the time of writing this article, a search on LinkedIn found 35,000 vegan professionals and/or businesses listed. In addition, LinkedIn hosts several groups of vegan and plant-based professionals, each with thousands of members.

When I interviewed and surveyed vegans for my book, The Vegan Transformation: A Journey to Heal Yourself and the World, one of the most common benefits that my research participants reported was a heightened sense of mission, which in many cases, led to a realignment of their professional path.

Veganism not only improved their personal well-being, but also served as a catalyst for creating ethical businesses. They created plant-based businesses in a wide range of areas, including restaurants or food stalls, catering, hospitality consulting, health and fitness coaching, cooking classes, supplements, commercial products, humane education, and business consulting.

Creating a business that aligns with our ethical values offers a deep sense of fulfillment. One interviewee, Geoff Palmer, vegan body-building champion and founder of a plant-based fitness supplement company, found his purpose through educating others about the science of plant-based nutrition for health and fitness. Noting a statistic that only 20 percent of vegans are men, he said, “I focus on the science and the physical fitness aspect to help create a shift so that men can better receive the message.”

Another interviewee, Meredith Marin, brought her expertise to create a business as a vegan hospitality consultant. She found few vegan entrees in local eateries and saw the need to help restaurants attune to vegan consumers. Subsequently, she worked with food service businesses to provide enticing vegan options. She has since created a Vegan Hospitality Consultant certification program to train other vegans to offer consultancy services in their communities. Marin summarized the fulfillment of creating a values-aligned business: “Being vegan changed my whole life. It added to my sense of purpose in life, in parenting, and in my career.”

There are countless ways that we can bring our unique gifts, interests, passions, and voices to share the life-changing power of a vegan lifestyle. Here are three tips for serving your purpose through a values-aligned business:

Find the intersection between your passions, gifts, expertise, and what is needed in the marketplace. We are most fulfilled when bringing our strengths, interests, and experience to provide solutions and fill needs—whether that be offering services or products.
Don’t wait to have all the answers to get started. Often our path evolves over time, and we discover next steps once we are in motion. Take the first aligned step toward creating your business or offering.
Seek the help of mentors and coaches. Others who have traveled the path of vegan entrepreneurship can lend invaluable insights—whether through vegan business networks, books or resources, or hiring a coach or consultant.

Whatever our initial reason for going vegan, when we break through the limits of our cultural conditioning to embrace plant-powered living, often we want to share this transformative experience with others, and that sharing can apply itself to the business realm. The same path that brings us personal health and vibrancy, healing of disease, and enjoyment of nourishing food can, through business, spread values of compassionate, sustainable, and cruelty-free living and carry the potential to heal many of the ills in our world.