🔒Planting Seeds: Vegan chefs tap growing market by staying small

In between orders on a recent Sunday afternoon, the counter staff at Three Girls Vegan Creamery in Guilford had little time to chat or glance at their phones.

The workers were in constant motion, vacuum-sealing packages of crabless crab cakes, labeling containers of sauce and stacking foil-wrapped holiday roasts in a freezer.

The steady activity was in service of a growing clientele: Three Girls Vegan Creamery sold out of their $78 Holiday Roast well before most holiday decorations went up. Now the staff was tasked with packing and shipping nearly 400 orders of a wheat-gluten-and-chickpea roast filled with plant-based stuffing and cranberry sauce.

“We sold a ton. We have to cut it off at some point so we sold to our limit,” said Tracy Alexander, founder of Three Girls Vegan Creamery.

The Holiday Roast won a national contest for plant-based entrees in November and is only one of the Guilford company’s successful products: Three Girls is looking for an industrial space to ramp up nationwide shipping and plans to roll out a new line of filled pastas later this month.

Alexander’s vegan products are now available both at the original location, at 645 Boston Post Road, and at Three Girls Vegan Downtown, at 23 Water St., near Guilford’s Town Green. She runs the business with her adult daughters, Brittany Guerra and Taylor Pitts, the “three girls.”

“People appreciate the creativity,” Alexander said when asked for the key to the company’s growing sales and expanding product line. “You’re always going to find something new here.”

Italian-inspired recipes

Three Girls Vegan Creamery started in 2016 after Alexander’s mother was diagnosed with cancer and she began researching the health benefits of a vegan diet, which consists of exclusively plant-based foods. She has since expanded the company’s commitment to animal-welfare issues, with donations to local animal nonprofits.

Alexander gives credit for Three Girls’ success to her trove of 400 recipes that transform the hearty Italian dishes of her New Haven childhood into plant-based versions. That translates into a menu with lots of items like vegan lasagnas, sausage and peppers and even traditionally meat-and-dairy-laden classics like pizzagaina, or Easter ham pie. (Alexander only makes that labor-intensive favorite on special occasions.)

Three Girls’ first products — cheeses like parmesan, ricotta and mozzarella made from nuts that gave the company the “creamery” in its name — are also big sellers, both at the counter and online.

“When I put the website up, I had an e-commerce portion of it and I had put just the cheeses up initially,” Alexander said. “Over the years, we just kept adding — it just kind of happened organically.”

Alexander said she’s kept the business growing by sticking to a focus on Italian-inspired recipes and staying true to her vision of tasty, healthful food. She has also resisted franchising or expanding beyond her comfort zone, ruling out a full-service restaurant anytime soon.

“I'm not trying to do a big, fancy restaurant,” Alexander said, citing the demanding hours and finances of the business. “I think part of our success has been that we never borrowed any money,” she added. “If we needed a refrigerator, I just sold more cheese that week.”

Eateries falter as market grows

That caution seems to be warranted as vegan and vegetarian restaurants in the New Haven area have struggled to stay in business in recent years. The most recent casualty was Pataka in New Haven, a vegetarian Indian restaurant on Howe Street that closed late last year. Upscale Vegan eatery G-Zen in Branford shuttered in April; the owners said they wanted to focus on a West Hartford location.

In downtown New Haven, Ahimsa and Red Lentil are among the vegan eateries that have shut down in recent years, even as many area restaurants and college dining halls add vegan options. The last vegan full-service restaurant left standing in central New Haven is The Cannon on Dwight Street, a sports bar focused on soccer that features a vegan food menu.

Those ups and downs reflect the overall plant-based food segment, which has had both growth and setbacks in recent years.

Plant-based products could make up to 7.7% of the global protein market by 2030 with a projected value of over $162 billion, according to a 2021 report by Bloomberg Intelligence. That number would represent a 451% increase from the 2020 market value of $29.4 billion, according to Bloomberg.

“Food-related consumer habits often come and go as fads, but plant-based alternatives are here to stay — and grow,” Jennifer Bartashus, senior consumer staples analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said in the report.

But some recent forays into offering vegan foods to the mass market have fallen short. McDonald’s tried out a McPlant burger made of Beyond Meat patties but the sandwich failed to become a permanent menu item. Top vegan manufacturer Beyond Meat’s stock has swooned as sales fell far short of projections, down nearly 80% for the year.

A food industry analyst quoted in the New York Times said vegan foods are the future, but his outlook is long term.

"This is a 20- to 25-year story,” Mizuho Americas analyst John Baumgartner told the Times. “It’s not going to happen in three to five to 10 years.”

Vegan food demand has greatly increased in the grocery sector, said Peter Dodge, director of New Haven’s veteran vegetarian market Edge of the Woods.

Dodge was one of a group of “idealistic people” who opened the store on Whalley Avenue in 1977 with a full range of produce and grocery items but no meat; he saw business boom during the pandemic but said it had recently returned to pre-pandemic levels.

About a third of the market’s customers are now completely vegan, compared to a much smaller percentage in prior decades, Dodge said.

“I've seen a big expansion of products available, so the demand is there,” he said.

In addition, about half of Edge of the Woods’ hot and prepared foods are now free of animal products.

As for vegan restaurants, “I’ve seen them come and go,” Dodge said. Entrepreneurs with high ideals are often felled by the hours and margins of running an eatery, he added.

“It’s a really demanding business — restaurants are no easy game,” he said.

Profits in pop-ups

Staying small and specialized has paid off so far for Silvia Loney, who has been growing her plant-based business by catering and running Chef Sil’s Vegan Kitchen pop-ups across the city in the last year.

Of Cuban and Colombian heritage, Loney specializes in Latin fusion dishes in addition to vegan sushi. One of her prized recipes is a vegan version of the Colombian soup sancocho that exchanges mushrooms and lentils for the traditional chicken.

After switching to a vegan diet for health reasons, Loney began cooking as a way to recreate the dishes of her childhood in Florida.

“I was just playing around with different flavors and just making sure that I had the same flavor and then the same feeling that I had when I ate those foods growing up,” Loney said.

Loney turned to local entrepreneurship programs to help turn her cuisine into a business, including this spring’s Food Business Accelerator, a partnership between Collab and CitySeed. Now she offers her vegan sushi as a caterer and operates as a pop-up vendor at events like this summer’s Gather New Festival.

“The industry is very tough when it comes to real estate — finding a place that you can actually rent out for me to have a brick and mortar,” Loney said.

She cooks out of a commercial kitchen and also operates as a “ghost kitchen,” preparing food for delivery only.

“There’s a demand for vegan food, so right now, that's what's working,” Loney said. “But I am obviously working towards a bigger picture. I'm working towards getting something established for myself, whether it’s a brick and mortar or having something mobile in terms of a food truck. I’m exploring all of that right now.”