Veganuary

Veganuary is a British charity and annual pledge campaign that invites members of the public to eat vegan for the 31 days of January. Since its launch in 2014 it has grown from a household experiment into what organizers plausibly describe as the world’s largest plant-based pledge, registering more than two million sign-ups across its first decade and serving as the scheduling peg around which supermarkets, fast-food chains, and food manufacturers time their January product launches. More than any other single intervention, Veganuary has made the first month of the year the calendar’s busiest window for plant-based commerce and press.

Origins

The campaign was founded by Matthew Glover and Jane Land, a married couple living in Essex. Both had become vegan in 2013 after a year of incremental change, and they had been looking for a mechanism that would let curious omnivores try the diet without committing to it indefinitely. Glover, who had run a small marketing business, noticed that Movember and Dry January had turned single months into national habits; Land, a primary-school teacher, wanted a version with an animal-advocacy frame that did not require arguing with anyone at the kitchen table. They registered the name, built a simple website, and launched their first campaign for January 2014 with 3,300 sign-ups (Glover and Land, 2019).

Growth was initially steep in percentage terms and modest in absolute numbers. The 2015 campaign registered around 12,800 participants, the 2016 campaign 23,000, and the 2017 campaign about 59,500 (Veganuary, 2018). In 2018 the charity crossed 170,000, in 2019 it passed 250,000, and in 2020 more than 400,000 people signed up through the official site. Sign-ups reached 629,000 in 2022 and 706,000 in 2023, with organizers estimating considerably larger numbers of unregistered participants following along informally (Veganuary, 2024; ProVeg, 2023).

The retail effect

The campaign’s most visible legacy has been on supermarket shelves. Mintel’s analysis of UK food innovation found that one in four food and drink product launches in the United Kingdom during 2019 carried a vegan claim, a proportion Mintel attributed in part to manufacturers racing to have products in stores for January (Mintel, 2020). Veganuary’s own campaign reports tally the number of new products and menu items launched each year against the pledge: 825 new products and menus in 2023 and more than 1,600 in 2024, across supermarkets, restaurant chains, and foodservice operators in more than twenty-five markets (Veganuary, 2024).

Specific retailers have organized their January trade around the campaign. Sainsbury’s announced its “biggest-ever” Veganuary range in 2022, featuring more than one hundred new plant-based lines and a dedicated front-of-store fixture (Sainsbury’s, 2022). Tesco, which has partnered with chef Derek Sarno’s Wicked Kitchen label since 2018, has timed its largest expansions of that range to January and reported double-digit year-on-year growth in plant-based purchases during the Veganuary window (Tesco, 2022). Fast-food chains including Greggs, Pret a Manger, KFC, Burger King, and McDonald’s have all used Veganuary as the launch window for plant-based menu items during the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Kantar household-panel data have complicated the retail story. Kantar’s analysts reported that plant-based purchasing spikes sharply in January before settling back to a lower plateau, with net growth in the category driven less by headline launches than by repeat purchasing from existing flexitarian households (Kantar, 2023). Veganuary itself has accepted this framing, arguing that the pledge’s value lies partly in giving companies a scheduling excuse to invest in product development that continues to sell through the rest of the year.

Research on behaviour change

The question that most interests researchers is whether people who complete Veganuary stay vegan or something close to it. The charity’s own end-of-campaign surveys, which are self-selecting and skew toward engaged participants, have consistently found that around 80 percent of respondents report intending to remain vegan after the month, and that roughly a quarter to a third of surveyed participants identify as still vegan at the six-month follow-up (Veganuary, 2023). Independent research has been more cautious but broadly corroborative. Faunalytics, the movement’s main independent data outfit, reviewed the available studies in 2023 and concluded that pledge-based campaigns produce measurable reductions in animal-product consumption lasting at least six months, with a smaller but real share of participants sustaining a full vegan diet (Faunalytics, 2023).

ProVeg International, which runs the Veganuary campaign in several non-English-speaking markets, has published its own survey work showing reductions in meat and dairy consumption among participants who do not maintain full veganism. A 2023 ProVeg analysis found that, of respondents who did not remain vegan after the challenge, the large majority reported eating meat at least half as often as before (ProVeg, 2023). This reduction-of-intake effect, aggregated across hundreds of thousands of participants, is likely the campaign’s largest quantitative contribution, even if the headline figure everyone cites is full-conversion retention.

Academic work has begun to catch up. Published evaluations using matched comparison groups suggest that the Veganuary pledge increases plant-based intentions and, in the subset of participants who complete the month, shifts identity and social norms around meat eating in directions predicted by the Theory of Planned Behaviour. Researchers have flagged the usual caveats: self-report bias, the difficulty of tracking dietary change with panel data, and the possibility that the people most likely to sign up are also the most likely to change regardless.

Organizational evolution

Veganuary has become a professional charity with offices in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Brazil, India, Chile, Argentina, and a roster of partner organizations elsewhere. Matthew Glover stepped back from day-to-day leadership to co-found Veg Capital, an investment vehicle directing returns back into animal-advocacy work, and the Humane League UK. Jane Land served as co-director through the campaign’s rapid-growth years before leaving to pursue other projects. Toni Vernelli, an environmental campaigner who joined early, has led much of the charity’s external communications through the 2020s.

The campaign has also absorbed criticism from within the movement. Abolitionist voices have argued that a 31-day challenge dilutes veganism into a diet, framing it as a lifestyle trial rather than a moral position. Veganuary’s reply, consistent across interviews with its founders, is that the pledge format meets people where they are and that the retail infrastructure it has helped build makes sustained veganism materially easier for everyone else. Ten years on, both claims are hard to dismiss.