Vegan cheese at Pizza Hut UK
If you are a vegan on the Internet this week, you will have probably read the news regarding a vegan cheese trial taking place at some Pizza Hut locations in the UK.
Here are the basics.
Pizza Hut customers can visit a handful of restaurants between October 2nd until November 26th, 2017 and ask for their pizza to be made with vegan cheese.
The stores taking part in the trial are:
- Pizza Hut CANTERBURY
- Pizza Hut CRAWLEY
- Pizza Hut THANET
- Pizza Hut BLUEWATER
- Pizza Hut CHATHAM
The vegan pizza options are limited to dine in only. No takeaway at the moment. It is also important to note that the gluten free base at Pizza Hut is not currently suitable for vegans. You can see all the other ingredients the company lists as vegan on their website by clicking here.
I wanted to give you a few more insights into how and why this trial came about, so I reached out to the person responsible.
Pedro Zúñiga is the founder of Coffee & Cheese, an incredible vegan cheese, vegan meat and coffee distribution company. I wrote about how you can buy bulk Violife from Pedro back here on my blog.
Pedro has singlehandedly manoeuvred this trial with Pizza Hut and is supplying the cheese through his company.
Here is what he had to say about the trial.
FGV: Which Violife product are you supplying for the Pizza Hut trial?
Pedro: They will use the new Violife Grated for Pizza we are introducing to all our customers in the next few days. We will have them available in 11x200g formats for shops and 1kg bags for caterers.
FGV: How excited are you? What positive effects it will have?
Pedro: From a personal point of view, I feel like this is a little step towards a more compassionate world, and it proves that even large non-vegan companies can no longer ignore the vegan community. Don’t get me wrong, I sill would much rather have a Protein Punch on a Turmeric base from PickyWops, but if your non-vegan friends or family happen to take you to Pizza Hut, it’s good to know that you have a vegan option there as well.
From a professional point of view, it shows that we are capable of making changes to large mainstream chains while keeping our vegan identity and being a small independent vegan company. This is encouraging for all independent vegan businesses, and reminds us that we can trigger changes even if we are small, and even more so if we work together and support each other. If we make our voices heard in this short trial period, they will roll out to a permanent, nationwide vegan cheese supply at all 330 Pizza Hut Restaurants in the UK. Takeaways aren’t involved yet, but this may also happen in the future if it goes well in the Restaurants.
You can show your support for Pedro’s hard work by visiting his website and following him on Facebook and Twitter.
