Vegetarian certifications on food labels: what do they mean?
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of vegetarian and vegan symbols on food packages, keeping pace with the retail sales of meat-free foods and the growth of the vegetarian market. Several vegetarian and vegan nonprofit organizations in North America and Europe have introduced these icons for use on packaged food products and for display in restaurants. These organizations approve companies and restaurants to use their logos. Along with these groups, many private companies have developed vegetarian and vegan icons for their own food items, including some large, mainstream corporations, such as Campbell’s. This article will explain what these logos mean and discuss their reliability in assuring that a packaged food product is authentically vegetarian or vegan. While doing research for this article, we discovered that every group or company has its own guidelines for certifying a food product as vegetarian or vegan. This is not surprising given that, according to Geraldine Ju
