Veganism Around The World
January 2026
“This research is a first pass at trying to encapsulate the factors inhibiting, facilitating, and coinciding with veganism around the world. One thing that we can say for certain is that the global landscape of veganism is as diverse as the land itself.
– Elise Hankins
Executive Summary
Purpose and scope
This report maps the current global landscape of veganism and associated factors to inform individuals, advocates, policy-makers and industry professionals about the growth of veganism and areas of opportunity for progressing vegan solutions. Information was collected through the following methods.
- Analysis of existing international data, including per capita animal product consumption, number of animal product alternative companies and number of vegan restaurants.
- An original online survey conducted in 10 countries, involving approximately 2000 participants (around 200 per country), to gather novel insights into the prevalence and perception of veganism.
- The development of detailed, expert-reviewed profiles for 21 countries, examining factors that contribute to the growth of veganism in key regions.
This report is largely comparative and descriptive; we do not aim to provide concrete explanations for particular findings. However, whenever possible, we do present context and potential explanations for our findings. The objective of this report is to provide a rounder and richer understanding of the growth of veganism globally, with fresh insights into where there are opportunities for further growth. Individuals might use this report to understand which countries might be the most ‘vegan-friendly’ travel destinations, businesses might use it to inform future product marketing, whereas advocacy organisations might use it to decide on new territories in which to expand campaigns.
Methods
Desk Research. We conducted desk research to build a robust database of cross-national data, collating countryspecific data points such as:
- The population of vegans
- The number of vegan and other animal-focused nongovernmental organisations
- The number of vegan restaurants
- The number of animal product alternative companies
- Rates of import, export, production and consumption of animal products
- Agricultural employment and GDP percentages
This database forms the foundation of the quantitative analyses throughout this report and is available for reference, including further explorations and analyses. Additional desk research not represented in this database, but present in the report, includes Google Trends output and community-driven translations of the term ‘vegan’.
Original polling. We prioritised 10 countries (out of the 21 countries of interest) for further analysis via the original polling: Australia, Canada, Denmark, India, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA. These countries were chosen based on their wide regional spread and potentially favourable markets for vegan expansion as informed by The Vegan Society’s commercial information, naturally limited by budget and time constraints. These surveys captured diet self-identification, recent food frequency behaviour, definitional understanding of the term ‘vegan’ and sentiment towards vegetarians/vegans and vegetarianism/veganism.
Qualitative analysis. AI deep research tools were employed to generate individual country profiles for each of the 21 countries of interest:
| Countries of interest | ||
|---|---|---|
| USA | India | Israel |
| Canada | Australia | Turkiye |
| Mexico | New Zealand | Zimbabwe |
| Brazil | Russia | Cameroon |
| Japan | Denmark | Kenya |
| China | Germany | Nigeria |
| South Korea | The Netherlands | South Africa |
These profiles present the qualitative factors that inhibit and facilitate vegan uptake in the country, including political, cultural, historical, economic, religious, geographical and linguistic factors.
Takeaways
| Headline findings | |
|---|---|
| The term ‘vegan’ is widely understood. | Despite the term being coined less than a century ago, veganism is well understood globally, spanning different languages and cultures. In fact, many languages have adopted the term ‘vegan’ itself into their own vocabulary, rather than creating their own terminology. |
| Best countries for vegan foodies. | New Zealand has the most dining options for vegans globally per capita, dominated not by dedicated vegan restaurants, but by nonvegan/non-vegetarian restaurants having vegan options on the menu. However, if you are looking for the most dedicated vegan restaurants, Taiwan should be at the top of your travel list. |
| Veganism is rare in much of the world, but flexitarianism has gained major traction. | In our 10-country survey, flexitarians represented 16–30% of almost every country’s sample. The sole exception to this rule was Japan, with a flexitarian rate of 7%. Interest in animal product reduction appears quite high overall, although this has not yet translated into an embrace of 100% plant-based eating. India may be closest to such an embrace, with 14% of our sample reporting a vegan diet. |
| Veganism isn’t the ‘big bad wolf’. | Despite the prevalence of anti-vegan media and stereotypes, people’s feelings towards veganism and towards vegans themselves appear mostly neutral and actually lean towards positive in most cases. |
| Predictions realised. | The USA sweeps the stage when it comes to the number of animal product alternative companies. But when we consider companies per capita, Singapore comes out on top. Interestingly, back in 2017, the Sentience Institute predicted that Singapore would be one of the earliest adopters of cultivated meat. Three years later, Singapore became the first country to approve and sell cultivated meat and it continues to be a leader in both plant-based and cultivated alternatives. |
| Where’s the beef … but, more importantly, where did it come from? | India, despite not having a dedicated beef industry, is the fourth highest producer and exporter of beef. While seemingly paradoxical, this dynamic largely exists because of India’s extremely prolific dairy industry. The dairy and beef industries are deeply intertwined. Male calves and ‘spent’ dairy bovines (bovines that no longer produce sufficient milk) have no utility for the dairy industry, so are slaughtered for their meat. We use the term ‘bovines’ here to emphasise a semantic distinction: India’s beef production/export is principally carabeef (meat from water buffalo). Although both bovines, water buffalo do not carry the same sacred status as cows in India, making their slaughter (and even domestic consumption) permissible and common. |
| Eating and abstaining. | Israel leads in alternative proteins, but remains a major consumer of poultry (ranked first globally) and beef (ranked fourth globally). We can largely attribute this to their low consumption of pig meat (only 1.15 kg/capita annually) due to religious dietary laws (pork is not kosher for Jews, not halal for Muslims). Despite Israel’s strong position in alternative proteins and a cultural context that could favour plant-based options, consumption habits in Israel indicate that there is more work to be done. |
| Trending. | According to Google Trends data, searches for veganism is significantly more popular than vegetarianism and dramatically more popular than climate change, one of the most pressing issues of our time. |
