Why Restaurants Sell More Plant-Based Food When They Stop Calling It “Vegan”

The most well-meaning thing a restaurant can do for vegans, hand us our own separate menu, may also be one of the worst things it can do for plant-based food itself.

That’s the uncomfortable argument made by author and longtime animal advocate Colleen Patrick-Goudreau in a recent VegNews opinion piece, where she calls vegan-only menus a “velvet rope” quietly keeping non-vegans away from the dishes most likely to change their habits.

She’s right. And the research backing her up is bigger, older, and more specific than most people realize.

What the Word “Vegan” Does to a Diner’s Brain

A 2018 study by Linda Bacon and Dario Krpan at the London School of Economics, published in Appetite, tested four restaurant menu designs and found that placing dishes in a dedicated “vegetarian” section reduced the number of people who chose them.

Even infrequent meat-eaters, the exact diners most open to a plant-forward dinner, were less likely to order a vegetarian option once it had been siloed off in its own section.

The mechanism behind this is loss framing. When non-vegans read the word “vegan” on a menu, their brain skips past what’s on the plate and lands on what’s missing.

That tiny shift, from gain to loss, is often enough to push the dish out of consideration before the diner has even read the description.

“I don’t want to live in an exclusive vegan club; I want people who don’t identify as ‘vegan’ to eat plants and not animals.” Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, VegNews

What Stanford Found When Cafeterias Renamed Their Vegetables

The most-cited evidence on menu language comes from Bradley Turnwald and Alia Crum at Stanford, whose 2019 paper in Psychological Science tracked five university dining halls across the United States.

Across 137,842 individual diner decisions over 185 days and 24 vegetable types, the researchers tested four label styles on the same vegetables: basic, healthy restrictive, healthy positive, and indulgent.

Taste-focused, indulgent-style labels increased vegetable selection by 29 percent compared with health-focused labels, and 14 percent compared with basic ones.

The vegetables didn’t change. The recipes didn’t change. Only the words on the small printed card next to the tray changed.

Why Integration Beats Segregation

Patrick-Goudreau’s central argument, that plant-based dishes should live on the main menu beside the meat dishes, lines up with what the World Resources Institute’s Better Buying Lab has been telling food chains for almost a decade.

In one of the Lab’s most striking findings, a Brandwatch analysis of 15.4 million social media posts revealed the word “vegan” appeared in negative contexts more than twice as often as “plant-based.”

In a 2019 UK café field experiment run with the Lab, simply renaming dishes like “Meat-Free Sausage and Mash” to “Cumberland-Spiced Sausage and Mash” significantly increased sales of the plant-based version among general diners.

The mechanism is almost embarrassingly simple. People order from the section they’re already reading, with words that already sound appetizing.

If your veggie burger lives one page or one folded card away from the main menu, most diners never see it.

What to Call the Dish Instead

The naming question is where the research gets unusually specific.

WRI’s work singled out three families of language that consistently outperformed dietary labels: provenance words like “garden,” “field-grown,” and “farm”; preparation words like “roasted,” “slow-cooked,” and “fire-grilled”; and sensory words like “smoky,” “crispy,” “buttery,” and “rich.”

None of these descriptors hide the dish’s plant-based nature. They simply lead with what makes it good to eat.

That’s also why “Impossible Burger” and “Beyond Burger” work better than “Vegan Burger.” Both names front-load the product, not the diet category it happens to serve.

The Social Norm Nudge Most Restaurants Miss

Patrick-Goudreau highlights an experiment in which a small menu note reading “Our Meatless Burgers Are on the Rise” measurably increased meatless orders at a burger restaurant.

That finding tracks with the broader social-norms research by Gregg Sparkman and Gregory Walton at Stanford, who showed that “dynamic” descriptive norms, statements about behaviour that is currently changing, can shift food choices in cafeterias and restaurants.

The wording matters more than most restaurants realize. The note has to describe a current, rising behaviour, not preach about what diners should eat.

A note saying “more guests are choosing plant-forward dishes this month” quietly works. A note saying “please consider the planet” usually doesn’t.

It’s worth flagging that the social-norm research is genuinely mixed. Some recent UK trials in worksite cafeterias have found no effect at all, so the size of the nudge depends heavily on the venue, the audience, and how visibly the message is placed.

Why This Matters Beyond the Menu

Plant-based eating still runs into the same wall it has for years. The people most open to trying it are also the people most likely to be put off by the language used to sell it.

That’s the same psychology behind why so many men still avoid a plant-based meal in public, a pattern we covered in our piece on why half of US men still buy into the meat-equals-manhood myth.

Identity labels carry weight. And on a menu, that weight is almost always working against the dish.

If the goal is fewer animals on plates and more plants in front of people, the smartest restaurants will be the ones quietly redesigning their menus so the plant-based option feels like the default, not the deviation.

A Few Honest Caveats

Not every diner is repelled by the word “vegan.” Committed vegans actively want clear labelling so they can order without quizzing the server, and removing the word entirely would be a real step backward for accessibility.

The research isn’t arguing for hiding plant-based dishes. It’s arguing for leading with flavour and letting the dietary category sit in the fine print or behind a small leaf symbol.

That balance, prominent dishes and quiet labels, is what the evidence consistently supports.

A note on the numbers: most of the strongest effect sizes here come from controlled field experiments and online studies, and real-world results will vary by restaurant, region, and crowd. The direction is clearly established. The exact percentages are not laws of physics.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why Does the Word “Vegan” Lower Sales on Restaurant Menus?

For most non-vegan diners, the word triggers a loss-based association, what’s missing rather than what’s on the plate.

Field studies published in Appetite and analyses by the World Resources Institute have consistently shown that this small framing shift is enough to reduce orders, sometimes by double digits.

Should Restaurants Stop Labelling Vegan Food Entirely?

No. The research supports clearly identifying plant-based dishes with a small leaf symbol or fine-print descriptor.

What it pushes against is leading the dish name with the dietary category instead of the actual flavour or ingredient story.

Does Integrating Vegan Options Into the Main Menu Really Change Orders?

Yes, repeatedly. Multiple field experiments, including the World Resources Institute’s UK café trial, show that moving plant-based dishes out of a separate section and onto the main menu reliably increases their share of orders.

What About Fully Vegan Restaurants?

Strictly vegan restaurants serve a different audience and the rules shift. Descriptive naming still matters, but the segregation problem doesn’t apply since everything on the menu is already plant-based.

A Personal Note from the Editor

I didn’t go vegan because of what was missing from the plate. I went vegan because of what was on it.

The dishes that pulled me in had names like “smoky lentil shepherd’s pie” and “Sichuan crispy tofu,” not “vegan main course #3.” That experience tracks with everything the research keeps showing.

The word “vegan” matters far less than the words around it.

If you’ve been on the fence about eating more plants, the easiest first step is finding food that calls itself something delicious and happens to be plant-based. Our guide on how to start a vegan lifestyle without feeling overwhelmed is a soft place to start. No labels required.