Sanitarium, the health food company that makes weet-bix, is ramping up the promotional effort for their vegetarian meat replacement range, Vegie Delights.

For awhile they’ve been running a campaign called Meat Free Monday. It’s backed by a TV advertisement and a website. The idea is to encourage people to have a lighter meal following the weekend. Interestingly, the ’spokesperson’ is a butcher, perhaps to reassure customers that vegetarian food isn’t just for wusses (or that even the most hardened carnivore can mend their ways?)

Sanitarium has now launched a second campaign, called the 2Day Challenge. The idea is that for six weeks you have to buy two of their fake meat products per week (and therefore have two meat free meals per week). At the end of the six weeks you fill out a form and send it back to Sanitarium to go into a prize draw.

I’m curious to see how it turns out. I don’t think it will appeal to people who are already vegetarians because they are already meat free and the cost of buying the products is relatively high (Their sausages, stir fry strips, and mince meat cost about $4.50 - $4.80, so it costs you almost $30 to enter). On the other hand, maybe it’s a good excuse for vegetarians to try something new (I have registered for the challenge out of curiosity).

Alternatively, maybe the idea is that the the prize will be an extra drawcard for people interested in sampling a vegetarian lifestyle, but unwilling to give up the idea of meat. Love to know how many people fall into that category, and have emailed Sanitarium to see if they’ll tell me!

My favourite idea on the website is a DIY cookbook. Vegie Delights have pulled together about 15 - 20 recipes featuring their products. You can choose to download all of them, or just select the ones you want to create your own cookbook.

Anyhow, it’s great to see Sanitarium putting a strong marketing effort behind their Vegie Delights product range. This support is consistent with the company’s position statement on plant based eating, which advoctaes a healthy, vegetarian diet, consistent with Sanitarium’s Seventh Day Adventist origins. It always fascinates me that so many commercial vegetarian ventures have a basis in religion.

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