vegan pizza

I don’t know how you are all coping with me saying the same thing over and over, because I’m even sick of the sound of my own voice.

It is distressing to watch all of our vegan money be sucked up by huge corporations while independently owned local vegan business go under.

Ms Cupcake of London has recently announced they will be closing their doors (read about it here) and now we have this warning shot being fired by vegan pizza specialists Zad’s of Manchester.

Read the fill statement below:

It’s been a tough six months for us, here at Zads. We sent an email out around New Year explaining many of the issues we had been having, but it seems to have been picked up by a lot of junk mail filters (the Happy New Year subject probably could have done with being a little more original perhaps).

As many others have already said, the mainstreaming of veganism is incredible and something we’ve all dreamt of for a long time, but it comes at the expense of many vegan businesses; hardly a week goes by now that we don’t hear of another independent vegan business calling it quits and shutting up shop. We’re not quite ready for that yet, but we do need to make a few changes.

From this week, we will now be closed on Mondays AND Tuesdays, plus we will not be opening until 5pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

For some time now, our weekday takings have all but disappeared. It is not uncommon for us to not even take enough to cover staff wages, let alone the cost of the food we’re selling and the other costs which come with running a business. We have always been in the fortunate position of not being here to make a fortune. The owner of Zad’s has never taken a penny of income from the business and the business was set up as an extension of the vegan activism which he and the other founding staff members feel is so important.

We hope that compressing our opening hours a little will make the business a little more viable and if it is possible, we will take the opportunity to hire an extra driver at the weekend, to help take off some of the strain during busy periods. We would also dearly love to pay our staff a little more too, which they so thoroughly deserve. This also means that a small price increase is coming in the next couple of months, along with a few small changes to our menu.

Thank you all for your wonderful support, every order, every positive review, or lovely message, really does mean the world to us. We’re trying our very best to make this work, but we can promise you it’s not easy. Many sleepless nights over the last six to twelve months and probably more to come.

We have been inundated with amazing reviews recently, so we know you love what we do – we do, too.

OK. Back to me, FGV. I’ll put it simply again.

If we do not support independent vegan businesses, they will disappear. When we only spend our money in huge conglomerates, our money disappears out of our communities. Local people cannot make a living being vegan if we don’t support them. They can’t pay their bills. They can’t employ other local people.

If you live near Zad’s and you have the spare cash to eat takeaway food occasionally, please make a pledge to do it.

Visit Zad’s online and follow them on Instagram and Twitter.