You'll never achieve anything by going vegan

 Well you know what, turns out that there is power in personal spend.

In recent weeks, myself and @yesdaveitsvegan have been conducting a shopping experiment.  Going to our local branches of Lidl or Aldi or Tesco and M&S and seeing if we can buy the same products and if possible, looking at the price differences. 

Ireland, as you'd know, if you live here, is generally more expensive.  The biggest difference was in week 1 of our challenge when Aldi Ireland was a whopping 28% more expensive that it's UK counterpart.

But looking a little closer and there seems to be other interesting facts emerging

1) Ireland is more expensive for processed foods and prepared meals but cheaper for a lot of ingredients - split red lentils are cheaper in Ireland in every store we visited

2) The UK has a larger population and a bigger target market and with that we expected to find a better selection of products in the UK.   This wasn't always the case.  Aldi Stores in Ireland stock tofu, Karen couldn't find it in any UK stores.  Lidl Ireland had a bigger vegan range in the fridge section which included salads, burgers, tofu and meats 

3) Packaging - there seems to have been more steps taken to tackle packaging and plastic waste in Ireland than in the UK.  For example, Lidl has introduced paper covers and reduced plastic on their potted herbs.  In the UK they are still wrapped in plastic in standard containers

4) Way To Go chocolate - I have been going on about this for a while because I think it is brilliant that there is an affordable vegan chocolate that is made of  Fair Trade ingredients that pays an additional premium on top of the Fair Trade premium to farmers.  There is a section on the Lidl Ireland website about this.  Karen couldn't find this in the UK stores although it is supposed to be sold there too - it launched last year

 We have many weeks ahead of us to shop- I hope - but to me, it looks like stores here are reacting to consumer pressure.  We have a high percentage of vegans and people on the vegan journey here and I think we are quite vocal about telling stores what it is we want them to sell!

What do you think?