Supporting sustainable food choices during Veganuary and beyond

By Jaz Rabadia, Global Head of Responsible Business & Sustainability 

Consumers are increasingly seeking more sustainable options across the world today and at Just Eat Takeaway.com, we recognise the need to respond to this by enabling choice across our platforms. One of the ways we’re doing this is through our support for Veganuary. This initiative, which is run by a non-profit organisation, plays an important role in advocating for sustainable ordering by encouraging individuals to embrace and explore more plant-based options throughout the month of January.

Engaging our network of partners and consumers 

For the fourth year in a row, we’re pleased to be supporting the Veganuary challenge by actively engaging with our partners and consumers through a multi-channel communication campaign. We’re working with key restaurant partners, including both famous brands and local independents, to feature and promote a variety of vegan and vegetarian meals. This is alongside selected special offers to help encourage consumers to explore the wide range of non-meat options we have available across our offering.

As a business that offers more than 100 different cuisine types on its platform, we’re committed to meeting consumer demand for choice and convenience. Through our product for example, consumers can filter through cuisine categories to find what they’re looking for, including vegetarian and vegan options. Alongside this, we’re also seeing a noteworthy increase in the supply and demand for vegetarian and vegan options, reflecting a growing trend towards plant-based eating. Our latest Food Trends Reports highlights this shift: in the Netherlands, 29% of all dishes ordered on Thuisbezorgd.nl in 2023 were vegetarian whilst 15% of all dishes ordered on Lieferando in Austria were vegan. 

With the huge environmental impact of products such as meat and dairy, we know it’s important that our support in this space goes beyond Veganuary. One way we’re doing this is through educating our network about the impact food choices can have on our planet.

Engaging our employees

We’re using this opportunity to engage our employees on the topic too. We’ve introduced a workplace wellbeing challenge to inspire our colleagues across the business to explore plant-based foods and provide them with the tools they need to make more informed choices. And what’s really exciting is we will be rolling out a carbon labelling initiative in our Amsterdam canteen following a customer trial we launched in the UK. The aim is to increase employee understanding of the carbon impact associated with their meal choices. A ‘traffic light’ carbon rating will be visibly displayed alongside lunch dishes and will take into account the farming, production, transport, and packaging of these meals. 

Overall, as part of our mission to help drive a more sustainable future for our industry, our continued aim is to educate our network about the environmental impact of their food choices. This includes encouraging our consumers, partners and employees to consider more sustainable options and ongoing initiatives, like Veganuary, help us to do just this. Read more about our responsible business strategy here.