Veganuary: 'Accidentally Vegan' foods

Last updated: 02/10/2020 

If you've been veggie or vegan for any amount of time or have any intolerance or allergies, you'll understand the job that is reading through every ingredients list you come across. Thankfully, more and more companies are labelling their food as vegan! This even applies to food that isn't even marketed "as vegan". Here are some 'everyday' foods that you might not have known were vegan, either because they aren't explicitly labelled or because they don't seem it!

Pringles
Pringles are very good with their labelling; each can has a tick box for both vegan and vegetarian! The SFV flavours are:

• Original / ready salted
• Texas BBQ
• Paprika
• Sweet chilli
• Smokey bacon

Frustratingly, the salt and vinegar variety contain milk, which is also true for some, but not all, flavours of crisps.

Biscuits
You don't have to give up your favourite biscuits when you go vegan! There are so many different sorts that are SFV such as:

• Party rings
• Jammie dodgers, both the mini ones and big ones (just check the ingredients in case you have an old pack with milk in!)
• Chocolate bourbons (some brands: Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons)
• Tesco dark chocolate digestives (but not the plain ones for some reason?)

Dark chocolate digestives from Tesco, possibly the best biscuit to ever exist

• Oreos (All flavours, but triple check the peanut butter flavour for milk as if they're old packaging they may contain milk!)
• Fruit shortcake (Tesco, Mcvities, Asda, Morrisons)
• Original / chocolate chip hobnobs (but not dark chocolate ones)

Sweets
The biggest things to look out for in sweets that make them NOT vegan are gelatine (animal bones), beeswax, E120/Carmine (red colouring made from crushed up bugs) and honey. Rowntree's Fruit pastilles may NOT be vegan right now (although they've announced they will change them soon!), but you can swap them for:

• Jelly tots
• M&S Percy phizzy tails (Edit 13/05/2020: Turns out that despite making a really good move and removing gelatine from the entire range, M&S STILL uses beeswax in all of the Percy Pig products except from the tails! So watch out for this if you're planning on picking up some sweets from them any time soon 😔)
• M&S: veggie fruit pastilles, fire crackers, cola bottles, american hard gums, fizzy pop sweets, veggie wine gums, 

Fizzy pop and firecracker sweets from M&S. The left hand ones are different fruit flavour pencils with chilli, the right hand ones are flavoured as different fizzy drinks!

• Sour/fizzy/berry Colin the caterpillars 
• Asda: fruit pastilles, mocktail jellies, cola wands, cherry jellies, FIZZY cola bottles (but no the regular ones), fizzy strawberry wands, rainbow belts
• Tesco: raspberry bonbons, lemon sherbets, fizzy cola laces
• Sainsbury's: fizzy fangs, flying saucers, fizzy cola straws
• Morrisons: fizzy strawberry straws, fruit/lemon sherbets, flying saucers, rainbow straws, fruit jellies
• Starbursts
• Poundland dinky dogs (they're vegan versions of percy pigs!)
• Skittles

Party Food
Some of the boxes of frozen sharing food in the freezer isles are also vegan! Some are:

• Vegetable spring rolls (The only ones I know of that aren't vegan are the chilled ones from M&S; their frozen ones are SFV)
• Vegetable samosas (majority of brands, check for milk just in case)
• Tesco churros or M&S plant chef churros (the original churros from M&S come with chocolate that has milk in).
• Onion bhajis (I don't know of any that aren't vegan, but check for milk)
• Onion rings (Co-op, Tesco's mini onion rings, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's regular AND beer battered, Morrisons)
• Tesco plant chef BBQ jackfruit bonbons/bubble and squeak bites
• Tesco sweet and sour wantons
• Tesco sticky chilli cauliflower bites
• Itsu vegetable gyozas

Sauces
There's lots of vegan sauces out there, whether ready made or granules! These include:

• Bisto gravy (original/reduced salt original gravy granules in red tubs, the 'best' onion and vegetable flavours, onion gravy granules, vegetable gravy granules)
• Chip shop curry sauce (Asda, Bisto)

Bisto chip shop curry sauce is vegan, and can be found in Tesco!

• Tomato ketchup (Supermarket brands, Heinz)
• Sriracha/ sriracha mayo
• Heinz BBQ sauce
• Bird's custard powder (not really a sauce but worth mentioning, just use your favourite plant milk in replacement of dairy milk!) 

I hope this was useful and you rediscover some old favourites!