Veganuary is officially underway, as people across the world start the new year by taking on the challenge of trying to stick to a vegan diet for all of January.
Research indicates that by 2025 a quarter of Brits will be either vegetarian or vegan and that half of us already say we know someone who is vegan. But when it comes to plant-based dining, it turns out that Huddersfield is the UK’s most vegan-friendly city.
The findings come from global heating company Viessmann, who recently looked into which UK city is home to the Greenest Citizens.
The company surveyed 1000 UK residents in an effort to better understand the nation’s current relationship with green living and to determine what exactly Brits considered to be an ‘eco-friendly lifestyle’. Their findings identified five indicators of what the public generally consider to be good eco habits – transportation, diet, shopping habits, home improvements and government policy.
From there Viessmann created a unique scoring system to rank nineteen popular UK cities against their performance in these five categories.
And as part of their research, they determined that Huddersfield is paving the way when it comes to vegan eating, with 809 restaurants offering vegan options per one million people.
The second spot went to Edinburgh, with 808 restaurants per one million, and Bradford came in third with 672.
Research using Google search data has shown that interest in veganism has been on a steady upward trend over the last few years and while it’s difficult to put an exact figure on the number of UK vegans, research suggests around 50% of us say we know at least one person who is vegan.
Popular food delivery service Deliveroo reported a 163% increase in vegan orders during 2020 and Sainsbury’s sales of its vegan cheeses surpassed the company’s predictions by 300%.
The popularity of veganism can be linked to the on-going ‘Veganuary’ campaign which sees people pledge to adopt the lifestyle for the duration of January every year. The campaign is now in its 8th year and while figures for 2022 aren’t available just yet, in 2021 a record half a million Brits signed up to the challenge.