Another vegan restaurant chain has gone to the wall as The Vurger Co announced this week it is shutting all its stores. Seems the plant-based bubble has well and truly burst. The Mail has the story.
The British fast-food chain, The Vurger Co, which used ingredients such as tempeh, soya and Beyond Meat to make its creations, confirmed it had permanently closed its doors on Thursday.
It joins the likes of Veggie Pret, with Pret A Manger announcing earlier this month that its last three vegetarian-only stores would be converted into standard outlets that sold meat.
Elsewhere, Neat Burger, backed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Lewis Hamilton, closed half of its London sites in December while a vegan restaurant in Cheshire has been forced to start serving meat because it has too few vegan customers.
With three stores located in Manchester, Shoreditch and Brighton, administrators had been appointed at the The Vurger Co after it narrowly avoided collapse in July 2023.
The burger chain, which started out as a stall in Tottenham in 2016, took to both Facebook and Instagram to announce its closure to devastated fans.
The statement read: “To all our loyal customers and supporters, it is with the most incredible sadness that we have to tell you today that we have decided to close the doors to The Vurger Co restaurants for the last time.
“We’ve been building this community since 2016, and we still have people who have eaten our very first burger still following along today. We hope we made a lasting positive impact in your lives for years to come.”
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I’d never heard of them before today.
Started as a market stall in Tottenham 2016 [says DM story]. Maybe its marketing is based on local customers who can’t afford it after 14 years of Tory government following from the Blairist disastrous economic experiment which included a multi-billion dollar profit-making civilian exterminating war for George Bush’s military industrial complex friends? [Why complain about Israel and Hamas in comparison?]
I’m not a vegan or a vegetarian but I would be happy to eat vegan food which does not contain meat or meat products if it tasted nice. It doesn’t IMHO.
I have tried some of the supermarket “no-meat meat” products and so far all have been disgusting IMHO.
There are some successful vegetarian restaurants in London which have been in business for decades – and I often lunch at one near Euston – very tasty food and inexpensive.
So how come vegan restaurants bite the dust but vegetarian can be successful? Might it be because the food tastes of dust [sawdust]?
Years ago I once tried Linda McCartney veggie sausages. Never again – full of fat and took forever to cook them IMHO.
And remember, some people have to avoid eating meat for health reasons.
I’ve been known to select the vegetarian option at a pub if it seemed appealing at the time. I’ve never tried LM veggie sausages because I prefer home cooked Waitrose ‘free range’ (yeah right) pork sausages over any other ordinary ones I’ve tried and also because the list of ingredients in the fake sausages looks alarming.
For the Waitrose ones:
At the moment I’m looking for a good alternative to Waitrose sausages as it is part of John Lewis.
I’m not averse to eating vegetable matter (unlike my son-in-law) but I doubt I’d go to an exclusively vegetarian restaurant as I would expect my choice to be limited. I have a relative who avoids gluten, dairy and beef for health sensitivity reasons – I feel sorry that she can’t enjoy some of the food that I do.
Suggesting Vurger Co have gone out of business as a result of:
Seems a tad desperate.
“the list of ingredients in the fake sausages looks alarming.”
Agreed generally IMHO regarding the “meat-free” meat alternatives.
The Daily Mail article quotes:
However,
Not to me. It is historical and political fact.
And the Daily Mail article has numerous references to the economic situation like:
Join the club
Capitalism is the risk business. Capitalist anticipate what consumers will like, then risk their capital to bring it to market.
If they are right, they will make a big profit (the reward for risking capital), if they are wrong they lose their shirt.
The market process at work – better than Govt trying to pick winners, which is always unsuccessful… BEVs, heat pumps.
Bankruptcy is a vital market mechanism so resources are not misallocated. Unfortunately where Govt is involved the market can’t work – NHS, for example.
The wider market for vegan food, like BEVs, is just not there beyond a niche market. But niche markets are only profitable if you can charge high prices – like Rolls Royce.
So, the experiment has been done, now we know, consumers don’t want vegan food. Supermarkets are finding this out too.
Consumers decide which products are successful, which companies are successful and contrary to ‘rip-off theorists’, they decide prices too.
So if something could be invented to displace BEVs, something say half the price, twice the range, half the weight and accept a ‘charge’ in five minutes, would that do the trick? Who could invent such a machine that would signal the death knell for the BEV I wonder? Wait a minute——–.
“The market process at work”. Which is that people know best how to spend their own money.
Good. Eat meat. Be strong.
Exactly, get some proper snap down yer!
Back in 1982 I was working in a zoo on the big cat section. Every week I had to neck a couple of dozen chickens or despatch a dozen or so rabbits to feed the cats their ‘fur or feather’ – good for the cat’s digestion of course. Point was, I felt sick every time I had to do it – and after a couple of weeks I was quite good at it too, no suffering (beyond the initial grabbing before the coup de grace) – but I couldn’t reconcile my feelings with what I had to do. Eventually I realised that if it made me sick, I shouldn’t do it and it was like a switch being thrown. I became vegetarian, left the zoo and have been so ever since. This in the days before it was ever fashionable or the provision of fake meat products to assuage the latent longing for a bacon sandwich or beefburger.
My conclusion is that current vegans are largely posturing poseurs who will eventually drop their current fashion when it suits; and on the other hand, if people had to work for a month in an abattoir there would be many more vegetarians in the world.
Quite what the answer is to all this I don’t know, but a little more honesty about where our food comes from wouldn’t come amiss. Especially for the people who blithely coast the supermarket aisles in search of meat-stuffs where the suffering has been conveniently removed. If people are prepared to kill for their food – fine and dandy. At least their honesty is beyond reproach.
Given the zoo was keeping big cats they should have had the balls to just put the chickens and rabbits into the enclosure to let the cats hunt. It might have opened the eyes of a few visitors too.
I’ll well believe it. Have an upvote.
I think I’ll remain an omnivore though.
I remember many years ago, the sound of disgust from a couple of girls when an eagle owl at a wildlife park was given a (dead) rat. Ironically, they were both eating burgers at the time.
V is for virtue signalling, not veganism.
I’m not sure if I could kill something for food; I’ve never needed to do it.
However, I do know I couldn’t possibly cut into someone to carry out an operation or even give them an injection. So does that mean I should never allow myself to be operated on or have an injection?
Surely the whole point of “specialisms” is that people who are capable of doing a task, do that task on behalf of those who can’t. And that includes slaughtering animals for food.
As a vegetarian of three decades, I agree with you. I don’t think eating meat is “wrong”. It’s obviously natural. Funny how people bang on about allowing other animals to express their natural behaviours, but when humans do it’s selfish and wrong. What I objected to 30 years ago (when being vegetarian was considered pretty cranky still) was the method of meat production, i.e. animal welfare. Of course this is better now in this country at least, and it’s much easier to choose only free range/well bred meat than it was, but I can’t quite face going back to meat after all this time.
I don’t eat meat substitutes any more, just proper food (other than tofu, if that counts) but when I first became veggie at the age of 12 it was mock duck and fake schnitzels all the way, no one knew any different really and there was lots of worry about protein.
Anyone who thinks we are cruel to animals should turn on a wild life program and see a pack of hyena’s rip the guts out of an antelope.
The hyena knows no other way; we do and therein lies the difference, perhaps.
We don’t tear the under belly out and run away with half a leg in our mouths. We kill humanely, and we do that because meat and fish have always been a part of the human diet since even before we were truly human. Social engineers that think we should change all of that because they have been to university and think they know better how we should have lived back then would most likely say cavemen should have been content to eat berries and termites but that is because they never faced the fight for survival that our ancestors had. ——-I am sorry but back then you would eat dog and fight for the bones. There was no Sainsbury in those days.
Sounds like Parliament.
I understood Veganism rejects any exploitation of animals. I don’t see how a Vegan restaurant could cook and serve killed animals and still be called in any way ‘Vegan’. Given that the restaurant continues in its business of serving customers, I would have thought true Vegans would have to stop using it.
I’m amused to see ‘Vegan’ food for sale in supermarkets which also sell animal-based products. Yeah, OK, I’m easily amused.
Principles is principles, but money is money.
Currently the government is on a stop eating processed food drive. There is nothing more processed than a lot of the vegan crap being pushed by the supermarkets. Why do they try and make everything taste like meat? Possibly because that’s what our bodies crave having evolved as omnivores. Steak stew tonight with suet dumplings.
Oooo!
One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
I tried vegan “meatballs” just once. I cooked them in an Italian-style tomato sauce, with onions, garlic etc.
They were vile.
Never again.
I bought and cooked some tofu many years ago. Yikes!
Never again.
Yeah …. like chewing rubber.
But we don’t have carnivore cabbages that are really beef made to look and taste like cabbages? ——-So why are we doing it the other way around?
Funny how we get vegetarian burgers but not carnivore cabbages?