The demand of vegetarian and vegan dishes is increasing more and more, and the need for more plant-based products in restaurants as well. However, one of the problems identified in our research on the eating habits of Greeks in 2022 is that there are not enough vegetarian or vegan options in restaurants of our country, with the result that flexitarian consumers not being able to avoid eating meat, even if they wanted to. On the other hand, vegan and vegetarian consumers seem to have even more limited options, and often the inability or difficulty to dine with their non-vegan friends. For this purpose, we started an effort to map the restaurants in Thessaloniki that offer vegetarian and vegan main dishes on their menus.
In the international picture, as well as in Greece, consumer trends shown that the growing interest of looking for and buy vegetarian or vegan products becomes more popular. Large food chains, such as Burger King, KFC, Starbucks, etc. have included vegetarian and vegan options in their catalogs, and the food industry is constantly expanding the range of plant-based products it offers. At the same time, the search for alternative products of plant origin, is now also observed in catering spaces, such as restaurants, cafes, etc., while it is predicted to become more intense in the next period according to global data. Today’s reality allows restaurants owners to expand their menus including vegetarian options.
Considering the current data, we started the mapping from the city of Thessaloniki, looking for:
- vegan restaurants, which are still few, and
- restaurants offering complementary and vegetarian meals (vegan-friendly).
The goal is to help more and more people who are looking for these options, to be able to find the place where they will enjoy their plant-based meal easier, and for the restaurants to enhance their catalogs with new, nutritious and imaginative vegetarian meals. At the same time, this can also be a tool for visitors to our country, to be able to discover what vegetarian main dishes are offered.
For this purpose, following relevant communication with the restaurants to confirm that they truly offer vegan and vegetarian dishes, we have created a guide map for the city of Thessaloniki with all those restaurants that offer vegan and vegetarian main dishes in their menu. At the same time, we gathered these restaurants with their addresses and separated them in two lists – one for vegan/vegetarian restaurants and another one for vegan-friendly restaurants) – in order to have the information available in whole, while in the near future we intend to extend the list to other cities as well. Until now there have been 56 registered restaurants in Thessaloniki that offer vegetarian and vegan main dishes in their menu, while vegan-vegetarian restaurants are still limited (only 6 have been recorded for the city of Thessaloniki).
We, as HellasVeg, applaud any attempt to include plant-based main dishes, and for this reason we share with everyone interested in view of World Vegetarian Day, the map and the list of veggie restaurants that we have collected for the city of Thessaloniki so far.
HellasVeg’s special map (#HellasVeg’s map) includes restaurants that offer vegetarian or vegan main dishes along with other dishes (vegan-friendly restaurants), but also the veggie restaurants in Thessaloniki.
Everyone can browse the map at any time, looking for the nearest one point in the area!
You can find the list of restaurants here.
For HellasVeg’s map, you can follow the link below: