We recently re-ran our entire database, 28,601 packaged products, through our vegan rule set. The headline: 4,233 products pass cleanly, 13,726 contain at least one animal ingredient, and the rest land in our "check the label" pile because the data is incomplete or ambiguous.
Milk is the main offender, by a wide margin
Allergen data flags milk on 9,241 products. On top of that, our ingredient scan finds the word "milk" in 6,898 lists, whey in 2,858, cream in 2,004, milk powder in 1,507 and lactose in 1,094. If a product fails a vegan check, the safest bet is that dairy is the reason.
Honey deserves a mention too. It appears on 1,133 labels, and it is the ingredient people most often forget to look for.
The language trap
Earlier this year a reader wrote to us about yogurts with French labels that an English-only check had waved through. The ingredient was right there: "lait". It just was not in English.
That email changed how we work. Our keyword lists now cover milk and other animal ingredients in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Turkish. The result: 1,517 products in our database are flagged as non-vegan thanks to a non-English word alone. "Lait" by itself accounts for 956 of them.
If you shop imported products, this matters more than any other tip in this post: learn the word for milk in the language of the label. Lait, Milch, leche, latte, melk.
The hardest aisles
Some categories are close to a lost cause for vegans:
- Ice cream: 5 of the 137 products we checked pass.
- Chocolate: 7 of 319.
- Cookies and cakes: 36 of 813.
Compare that with pasta, where 120 of 366 products pass, and you can see why experienced vegans spend their label-reading energy on dessert aisles.
How to read a label fast
Start with the allergen box. Milk and eggs must be declared there in most markets, and it is faster to scan than a full ingredient list. Then skim the ingredients for the usual suspects: whey, casein, lactose, honey, gelatin. If the label is not in English, look for the local word for milk first.
Or type the product into our checker and let it do the scan. When we are not sure, we say so.