London shop selling vegan product that isn’t actually vegan?
What’s not cool?
When a company sells something as vegan when it isn’t really vegan.
One of my readers recently reached out to me with some information about Doughtnut Time in London selling a DIY vegan donut kit that included non-vegan ingredients.
The reader pushed Doughnut Time for clarification on the vegan status of this kit and this is what they found out:
I recently noticed that Doughnut Time were selling a vegan DIY donut kit which included Cookie Crisp cereal. As you know, most mainstream breakfast cereals are not vegan due to the vitamin D being derived from lambs wool. I contacted Doughnut Time to let them know this but they didn’t understand and said they looked at the ingredients and said there were no ‘active’ animal ingredients.
I then contacted Nestle to double check to make sure I was not wrong and they confirmed to me that the Cookie Crisp cereal is not vegan as it contains vitamin D derived from lambs wool. (They were actually very helpful and we’re able to tell me this immediately).
I then went back to Doughnut Time to let them know that Nestle confirmed to me that the product is not vegan because of the vitamin D.
They asked me to send them the correspondence between myself and Nestle, which I did. I also let them know that they could contact Nestle themselves to confirm. I advised them to stop selling the product or at least remove the Cookie Crisp as this is misleading to vegans.
They did not respond after this, however they are still selling the product labelled as vegan. They have added to the list of Cookie Crisp ingredients: ‘contains vitamin D’. This of course is not a resolution to the problem as they are still labelling a non-vegan product as vegan.
Since I was alerted by my reader, Doughnut Time has taken off a line in the item description that explicitly stated this kit was all-vegan. However, it still carries the (vg) label.
It also now features a disclaimer that the product contains vitamin D.
This blog post is just a heads up for anyone who has been confused by the labelling and marketing of the kit. It isn’t vegan now and has never been vegan.
As a company that markets a lot of products at vegans, it would be helpful if Doughnut Time had complete transparency and tell people they messed up.
A clear disclaimer on the product page that it isn’t suitable for vegans would also be the very lest they could do.
You can visit the Doughnut Time website online here.
