Veganuary is an organization that encourages and supports people in removing animal products from their plates for the month of January. In 2025, more than a decade after its founding, the initiative reported its best year yet, with 1.8 million members signed up worldwide.
In 2025, it expanded to include new countries such as Peru, Malaysia, and Canada. With the help of its new "Weird" campaign, the organization hopes to inspire more people than ever before.
Veganuary's campaign is unique; it doesn't just focus on the health and environmental benefits of a plant-based diet. Instead, it communicates by highlighting the "weirdness" of eating animal products. "Most of us consider the food we grew up on to be 'normal,' but when we stop and think about the practices behind many familiar foods, they start to seem a little strange," says Toni Vernelli, Veganuary's head of international policy and communications.
Veganuary's New 'Weird' Campaign
Veganuary's new campaign is already underway, and the ads are running on social media, in addition to airing on ITVX, a streaming platform run by one of the UK's leading TV stations, ITV.
Each of the ads follows a similar theme: the question "Weird?" is shown alongside thought-provoking and titillating images. For example, a pig with a sausage for a body is meant to highlight that "sausages are literally pigs stuffed into their own intestines," according to Veganuary. A slice of steak on a plate with a forest on fire, in turn, communicates that "animal agriculture is a major cause of deforestation."
A mug printed with a cow with udders protruding from the top represents the reality of the dairy industry ('cows produce milk to feed their children, just as our mothers do,' the text reads). The chicken, which has a nugget-like coating on its body, bears the text: 'Chickens come from birds bred so fast that they often can barely stand up. Is it strange to think of the suffering behind this crispy triple coating?
The idea behind the campaign is to question the social conditioning of eating animal products. Most people describe themselves as animal lovers (nearly 90 million Americans, for example, share a household with an animal companion), yet they eat meat. That's because most of the time we don't see animals on cramped, industrialized, polluting factory farms, where 99 percent are raised for the food industry, but we do see meat or dairy products wrapped in plastic in the supermarket or grocery store. Because of this, society avoids conflating one with the other. And let's pour some clear wine, how many of you have ever been to a slaughterhouse?
The Growing Success of Veganuary
There is a shift happening all over the world right now. More people than ever are choosing to reduce their meat consumption, if not eliminate it altogether, for the sake of their health or the health of the planet. For example, data from 2023 showed that in the UK, meat consumption was the lowest since records began in the 1970s.
Vegan Days is one of the initiatives that has helped raise awareness of the benefits of moving away from animal products. The initiative was founded in 2013, but really started to gain momentum in 2017 when 50,000 people signed up to the challenge to try a plant-based diet for a month. By 2023, that number had climbed to nearly 707,000 people worldwide. By 2024, the number had risen to nearly two million.
This significant increase was partly due to a new way of measuring participation. Previously, only email sign-ups were counted, but in 2024, it decided to include numbers from formats such as social media content and cookbook sales. Veganuary has an impressive success rate; its follow-up survey in 2023, for example, showed that 80 percent of participants had reduced their intake of animal foods by 50 percent or more. In addition, 28 percent of participants said they had chosen to stay on a 100 percent plant-based diet.
Veganuary doesn't just attract people, though. Several restaurant chains have also joined the campaign by introducing meat-free menus. For example, the popular global restaurant chain Hard Rock Cafe added a new vegan menu in 2024.
Source: VegNews.com
