Vegan Taste Week • Albert Schweitzer Foundation

In 2014, we launched the Vegan Taste Week (VTW) – a German website and newsletter program that encourages people to try a (more) plant-based diet. People who sign up for the newsletter get an email per day for seven days with recipes, tips and background information. After this first week, they get one additional newsletter every month. On the website, we provide our readers with a huge recipe database, product tips and background articles about vegan lifestyle and nutrition.

We use several channels to accumulate more sign-ups for the Vegan Taste Week:

our local groups,
our (free) Google Grants ads budget,
website pop-ups,
our leaflets,
our Facebook page.

Between 2014 and 2023, a total of 298,374 people have taken part in our Vegan Taste Week.

A survey which we conducted in order to gain insights into the motivation of our participants and the impact Vegan Taste Week had on them revealed extremely satisfactory results:

64% of respondents ate somewhat or significantly more vegan food during VTW than before. 21% ate completely vegan.
91% of respondents agreed with the statement, »Thanks to my participation in the Vegan Taste Week, I can prepare more/better vegan food today.«
76% can more easily locate vegan foods while grocery shopping thanks to VTW.
48% of those participants who ate meat before the VTW were planning to switch to a vegan diet in the future after finishing VTW. This also applies to 45% of flexitarians, 74% of pescetarians and 83% of vegetarians.

In 2018, the Polish version of the Vegan Taste Week online program went live under the name Tydzień na Weganie (»vegan week«).

Facebook group: Vegan Tips for All

The »Vegan-Tipps für alle« (»Vegan Tips for All«) Facebook group, which we launched in 2017 and moderate ourselves, is an interactive addition to the Vegan Taste Week. The members engage in discussions and share tips and recommendations on a wide range of vegan-related issues. We make sure that only properly researched and no pseudoscientific information is shared (the internet and social media are awash with unsupported information, particularly on the subject of health). We also suggest topics for discussions ourselves and, if necessary, provide references to our or other well-researched websites. Since we cannot offer one-to-one support for our VTW participants, we consider a Facebook group to be a highly effective happy medium. By the end of 2023, the group had over 42,400 members.