Tesco commits to labelling own-brand vegan products

Animal Aid has received confirmation that supermarket chain Tesco is to introduce vegan labelling across its own-brand product range. It is the second major retailer to commit to vegan labelling in the last six months after Asda made a similar pledge in December 2016. Both announcements come in the wake of our Mark It Vegan campaign, which calls on UK supermarkets to clearly identify all vegan-friendly own-brand products.

As part of this new initiative, Tesco has created an in-house vegan symbol that will begin to feature on the packaging of relevant goods in the near future. Whilst it will take time to roll it out to all of the company’s vegan own-brand products, Tesco assures us that it hopes to complete the process within two years. The only vegan products that will not feature the new symbol are those where the packaging is too small to make it practical.

A spokesperson for Tesco stated:

‘We continue to be committed to serving all our shoppers a little better every day and our new Tesco vegan and vegetarian labels will help the growing number of customers looking to buy these products. We want to ensure that all our products that are suitable for vegans are labelled as vegan wherever possible, and the new labels will start to appear on products in the near future. We will take a phased approach to updating our product labels with the aim to complete this process within the next two years.’

Prior to the launch of the Mark It Vegan campaign only two major UK supermarkets – Sainsbury’s and the Co-op – widely labelled their vegan products, but now that number has doubled and we hope that more will soon follow.

More than 90 per cent of the UK population regularly shops in supermarkets, so by ensuring these companies label their own-brand vegan products, we are helping to make it easier for people to go vegan. It also helps to increase public awareness of veganism, as well as demonstrating the great range of everyday products that are suitable for vegans.