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Does Starbucks Hate Vegans?

Joseph Connelly
3 min readMar 10, 2020

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Next year Starbucks will celebrate its 50th in business and apparently so will its sadly un-veggie-friendly menu. When it comes to plant-based dining, the coffee giant is squarely stuck in the decade of its birth. What veg options it does offer, all cheese and eggs, look as if they were lifted straight off a hippy, crunchy granola co-op menu from the 1970s, when most people had never seen and couldn’t pronounce the word vegan: “What’s a vej-in?”

So much for being a progressive company, as the ubiquitous coffee giant likes to claim. Wherever you look, and don’t look, the rapid growth of plant-based food choices is obvious. Every day a new vegetable protein appears on the market; another fast food chain adds a vegan (or veganizable) option to its menu. And then there is Starbucks. If you want to “eat vegan” at Starbucks today, at least your choice is easy: Overnight grains or one bagel with avocado spread, please. That’s all, folks!

While the world is catching up and embracing the myriad health, ethical, and environmental benefits of leaving animal products off one’s plate, Starbucks is not only stuck in the ’70s … it is sadly regressing.

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Joseph Connelly
Joseph Connelly

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