Big Vegan Brands Snag Loyal Customers in Undergrad
Food companies are swarming campuses, where a nearly captive audience that’s about to start buying groceries is building its lifelong loyalties.
It was lunchtime in New Haven, Connecticut, and Yale senior Charles Kenney was eating sausage braised in beer, onions and apples—a seemingly unusual choice for the vegan math major.
The brats, however, weren’t your standard pork kielbasa. It was a pea-based vegan sausage from Beyond Meat Inc., whose plant-based burger is also available every day at the school’s 14 residential dining halls alongside more traditional college fare like roast turkey and macaroni and cheese. Kenney, who first tasted the brand on campus, says he plans to buy the meatless burgers and sausages at the supermarket himself once he starts graduate school at Rutgers in New Jersey next fall. “If I can afford it,” he adds.