A place for vegan staples
A brand new grocery store in the Klang Valley is catering to the growing demand for vegan ingredients and food.
JUST a few years ago, being vegan in the Klang Valley meant stocking up on fruits, vegetables, nuts, pulses and little else. Few stores catered to the vegan community and finding plant-based, cruelty-free products in supermarkets entailed hours of poring over brands and labels to ensure they fulfilled all the requirements of the vegan community.
But slowly but surely, things are changing for vegan consumers. A sure sign of this is the advent of Vegan District (www.facebook.com/vegandistrictmalaysia/), arguably one of the first proper vegan grocery stores in the Klang Valley, opened a few months ago by vegan entrepreneur Ratnasingam Yookarajah.
Ratnasingam, better known as Ratna, has been a practising vegan for the past 10 years. He also started websites like malaysianvegan.com and its accompanying Facebook page – both of which were some of the earliest online resources for vegans in Malaysia. From managing those channels, he figured out that there was a much bigger market for vegans in the Klang Valley (as opposed to Seremban where he is from).
“The market is better here – in Malaysia, I think Kuala Lumpur and Selangor have the most vegans,” he says.
Ratna, 33, also wanted to provide Klang Valley vegans with a worry-free space where they could just pick up daily essentials without having to carefully peruse a laundry list of ingredients first.
“If you go to a normal supermarket, for a vegan or a vegetarian, it’s a hassle to go around and look for products that are safe for consumption because you may look at a product and think it’s vegan but when you look at the ingredients, it may not be.
“And supermarkets are so big these days, so imagine having to look section by section and brand by brand to see which one is vegan,” says Ratna.
At Vegan District in Kota Damansara, Selangor, you’ll find a whole host of vegan fare from dairy-free yoghurt to vegan cheese, egg replacers (to use in lieu of eggs when baking cakes), vegan mayonnaise, plant-based meat alternatives and even vegan kaya spreads.
Ratna is fastidious about checking the provenance of each item in the store, and even goes to the extent of calling the manufacturers to verify the source of the products.
“Finding products has been hard and it takes a lot of time because you have to verify that all of the products are actually vegan. Some of the products have vegan labels but might not be vegan. The
Impossible Burger (a plant-based burger patty said to taste like meat) for instance, is not considered a vegan product because it has been tested on animals,” says Ratna, who does not compromise on the core vegan ethos.
At Vegan District, things that tend to fly off the shelves include items like dairy-free yoghurt, vegan junk food like beetroot chips and spinach chips as well as vegan cheese.
“Most people coming in looking for things that used to be their favourites
before they were vegan – they still love it, so normally they come for things like yoghurt and cheese,” he explains.
Moving forward, Ratna is hoping to push his fledgling shop to new heights with a wider, more varied selection of edibles to satiate the daily needs of vegan consumers.
“I want to have more variety – more plant-based drinks, vegan meat – basically everything that you need in your daily life so you can lead a vegan lifestyle easily,” he confirms.