There’s a reason Get Woke, Go Broke is a meme. It’s an iron law of business: profit trumps virtue-signalling, every time. You can posture and preen for social media likes till the cows come home, but, at the end of the day, it’s all about money.
A mostly vegan cafe in Auckland is incorporating meat into its menu in an effort to stay afloat during New Zealand's sluggish economic times.
KIND Cafe & Eatery in Morningside opened in a 2018 as a socially conscious cafe with a plant-focused menu with the aim of reducing meat consumption. Following the lockdowns of the Covid pandemic, high inflation and slow economic growth, the cafe will start using ethically raised meat such as line-caught fish and free-range chicken to attract more customers and reduce costs.
To “attract more customers and reduce costs”. In other words, apart from a handful of tossers on TikTok, hardly anyone is demented enough to be a vegan, and all those ultra-processed ‘plant-based foods’ are incredibly expensive.
“It’s a bit heartbreaking for the vegan community,” said Nigel Cottle, a part-owner and manager of KIND, told RNZ’s Checkpoint [sic]. “We are one of the few places they can call home.”
The poor dears. Imagine the shock of dragging your emaciated, skeletal frame painfully all the way through the door, only to be assailed by the sight of real food.
Cottle, who was not vegan, decided to open a vegan cafe because he saw a trend towards a plant-based lifestyle for environmental reasons. “It wasn’t ‘meat is murder’ but the sense was ‘Can we make the world a better place’ – two days without meat or whatever and try and make it more normal,” he said.
The cafe also uses a quarter of its profit to plant trees and make Morningside a greener suburb.
In other words, he bought into the hype and thought he could cash in on what social media told him was the latest trend. And got slapped in the face by harsh business reality.
KIND served up vegan dishes such as a crispy tofu bao bun and mushroom burger. However, Cottle found that the menu’s vegan dishes were not top sellers. About 20 percent of the menu included dairy-based cheese or eggs, but made up 50 percent of sales […]
Food prices have gone up in every food category, but KIND’s biggest cost rise has been labour.
“There is a lot of prep involved in turning a mushroom into a vegetable patties,” he said. “To makes these vegetables interesting it costs a lot of time.”
Still, perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on him. After all, he saw what looked like an attractive niche and went for it, which can be sound entrepreneurship.
And bigger people than him have found out the hard way that the hype over ‘plant-based foods’ doesn’t match up to reality and major supermarkets have been quietly dropping these products. Deloitte Access Economics now forecasts that the market for these frankenfoods will be half of what it predicted in 2019. Early rising star of the industry, Sunfed, has recently shut up shop. At last reports, vegan evangelist (is there any other kind?) James Cameron’s “organically grown vegetables and crops” farm in Wairarapa had been given over to “hundreds of cows”.
Sorry fellas, but TikTok clout doesn’t pay the bills.
