25+ Creative Vegan Business Ideas (2023)

In true Hipcooks fashion: I’m not a culinary school graduate — I’m a hack! Here’s my story:

I’m first-generation American (Mom is from Germany and Dad from Argentina). My parents were young foreign students in the US and their friends were the other international students: I was a kid surrounded by people from different nationalities, like Spain, Russia, France, and the UK. I was a child foodie and loved to experience culture through food.

I caught the travel bug early, living in Argentina (studying economics in college), traveling through Europe, and moved to England for graduate school (I have a Master’s in Economics from LSE.) While in school, I cooked my way through a series of London restaurants in the gastro-boom of the ’90s, just for fun. My first job was on the West Coast, as an econometrician at the RAND Corporation.

My backstory has absolutely nothing to do with what I am doing now, but that is what makes us so unique. I went to college for education and became an elementary school teacher. I taught 4th grade for three years. However, I knew that was not meant to be my “forever” job.

Something I have always enjoyed was shopping. I mean what girl doesn’t have this as a hobby?! I had always thought it would be amazing to have my own boutique and get to wear new clothes almost every day.

I started thinking about this crazy idea when I got pregnant with my son, Riley. I knew I didn’t want to teach forever and this was my way out! During the summer I quit teaching, I got a job at a local boutique just working part-time, and it was here where the wheels starting turning for this idea. I saw how much I loved going into work every day and how much I enjoyed helping others pick out outfits for different occasions.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do after college. My dad was an entrepreneur, and I had the spirit, but with no direction. I got a job in marketing/communications and ran a music production side hustle for a while.

I tried my hand at music full time and basically broke even after a year. I read The 4-Hour Work Week and started learning about online business, passive income, WordPress and SEO.

I am Wen, the founder, and president of House of Leaf & Bean, organic restaurant and cafe. I am passionate about Lifestyle Medicine due to my personal health journey. I believe that good lifestyle medicine is better than magic pills. "Let the medicine be the food; let the food be the medicine".

I’ve taken many leadership roles in organizations like Jacksonville Sister City Association, National Asian American PAC FL, Jacksonville Chinese Association, Jacksonville Mayor's Asian American Advisory Board, Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, Leadership Jacksonville, and more.

For as long as I can remember I have always been attracted to the idea of being a business owner. I’ve tried many businesses starting with my own DJ company. I got some business cards, printed them at Staples, passed them out, and waited for the calls.

It took a bit of time, but eventually, the calls started to come in and bookings started to happen. I did that for a couple of years until one of the DJ gigs some gangsters got into it and I was almost in the middle of a gang fight. Thank GOD things calmed down, but after that, I started looking for another business!

During this same time, the whole tech bubble was growing and I wanted a part of it. I took some coding classes in college and started using HTML to code my website from scratch. I kind of borrowed a lot of ideas from Yahoo but it was going to be mainly focused on my local city. I visited some businesses and got some of them to advertise. Things seemed to be going well when the bubble burst and I was once more left to venture out and look for something else.

Hey guys! I’m Heather Saffer, Founder and CEO of Dollop Gourmet. We make better-for-you gourmet frostings that contain half as much sugar as conventional frostings and twice as much flavor!

I’ve been fortunate enough to be featured as a winner on Food Network’s Cupcake Wars, Shark Tank, QVC, in Forbes, Oprah.com, Huffington Post, among others. As a business, we’re currently doing about $30,000 a month.

We started the food truck business in 2012.

We kept finding it very difficult to find locations to operate. We had a booker that we used to find our locations but fell short and we let her go. I took over our booking and found that most people did not want to book just one truck, not only that they were upset that most of the time the trucks didn’t show up or were late.

We learned the real need was not only helping the trucks but providing a turnkey service for the corporations. This was a game-changer for us, we were really struggling financially.

My personal story begins with my parents immigrating to Los Angeles to start a better life. Although ethnically Chinese, they were both born and raised in Japan as a result of my grandparents from both sides fleeing communist China. I was born in an extremely diverse neighborhood (we had around 7 different ethnicities on our block) near Pasadena, CA, before moving to Japan for 5 years between the age of 10-15.

I grew up playing sports and competing at a national level in Kendo, cross country, and track. I started Kendo at the age of 5 and competed at the national level in the United States and Japan. In high school, I was co-captain of our cross country and track team where we competed in the Division I state and national championships. It was through running that I truly learned perseverance and grit.

Unfortunately, at 19 years old, I became a paraplegic when I fell from 35 feet in the air in a snowboarding accident and shattered my back. Doctors told me that I would never walk again, but it furthered my drive and passion for adventure and trying new things. I finished college with degrees in Chemistry and Economics and continued to compete in marathons even got to train with the US Paralympic team.

Andy Shovel and Pete Sharman co-founded THIS, a UK-based vegan food company, in 2019.

This is currently taking over supermarkets, with its products primarily marketed to meat eaters who want to embrace a vegan lifestyle.

It is UK’s fastest-growing meat substitute brand, and the company was recently valued at £150 million. The company’s annualized revenue has grown from 0 to £17.5 million with a 333% YoY growth in UK retail in just 3 years.

Initially, co-founders Andy and Pete weren’t originally interested in encouraging people to consume less meat. They had a successful beef burger business before THIS.

Andy sold his first firm at the age of 21. He had always known he wanted to start his own business. He found the direction he needed during an accidental visit to a newly opened restaurant.

Shovel and Sharman, who sold their former franchise of (actual) beef burger restaurants in 2016, now challenge the meat industry and have achieved incredible success as the market’s top vegan brand.

Plant-based alternatives were still a niche market when they began the funding process at the beginning of 2018. The future of THIS is promising as it has already attracted £21 million in funding.

This brand has over 10,000 retail distribution points in almost all of the largest UK retailers, and their production rate for recurring business is nearly twice as high as the industry standard.

Hello everyone! My name is Bharath M and I’m the founder of Healthsols Facilitators Pvt Ltd. We started the company 6 months ago to create better quality healthcare services at affordable prices.

In the early days, we used to generate very little revenue & sometimes we have ended up with zero revenue. But within 3 months slowly order flow & revenue generation started & also recruited 18 employees in 11 cities.

Hi guys, My name is Ima, I am the Founder of Mellow Cosmetics. We are an online beauty store based in Brisbane Australia, we do however have customers from Europe, the U.S, Canada, and the Middle East. We sell a range of Lipsticks, Lip Paints, Eyeshadow Palettes, Highlighters, and more, super cute packaging to go with high-quality formulations.

I started from making $0 in the first year to making over $400,000 per year just from online sales and we have a lot of distributors and retailers stocking my products too.

I am David Buchanan, a professional chef, and owner of Chefs-Resources.com, a website geared towards providing professional chefs with free detailed culinary info (seasonality, flavor profiles, etc.) about fresh fish, oysters, and cuts of meat, as well as tons of free kitchen management articles. Paid subscribers get access to our premium kitchen management resources such as Excel sheets (prep sheets, recipe templates, ordering guides, etc.), video tutorials, and kitchen management articles.

The site is not about recipes, but I am a Chef, so here is one of my favorite personal creations...seared scallops, spring pea puree, lemon beurre blanc, fingerling potatoes, golden beets, asparagus, corn kernels.

My name is Lorena and I am originally from Barcelona. After 3 years living in Australia, I started Velvety. I saw a gap in the industry and I wanted to introduce the concept of ethical fashion to the largest amount of Australian people as possible.

My name is Asia Crawford and I am a Motherhood, Life, and Travel blogger that resides in Vancouver, Canada. I am a wife and mother to two sweet little girls aged 4 and 2!

I started with no community, 0 followers on any media page I had and in just two years have grown to 18.5K followers on Instagram, 1.2 MILLION monthly viewers on my Pinterest, 12.5K Pageviews a month on my blog website and have been nominated for 3 blogging awards.