Veganism, Sugar & the Plattered Story

Hello Everyone!

This is Maria, Founder, Product Developer, and a deck hand at Plattered.

Either you are reading about Plattered for the first time, or have seen ads on social media but have not tried our products, or have tried our products and absolutely love them! Thank you all for being here.

For my first blog, I thought I'd give you a background on why we have so many vegan products and also essentially about our brand

When I started out Plattered, my idea was to have clean, simple, mixes with good quality ingredients. I was quite appalled by the list of ingredients in most baking mixes that were available in the market. For our first product, I wanted a mix with minimal ingredients, that would give superlative results, and absolutely no preservatives or additives. 'Cos which homemade brownie ever had preservatives or additives in it? The Rich Choco Brownie Mix has 4 ingredients, including salt! Can't get better can it? That's what I thought. Our testers loved it, our customers loved it, practically everyone who didn't have a problem with eggs loved it!

When I started getting multiple requests for eggless versions of these brownies was when I realised how big a chunk of the market I was missing out on. It also occurred to me that if I were making an eggless mix, I'd rather make it vegan too. And that's how our first product with Vegan in the title came out.

Over time all our products have been developed as vegan or vegan friendly with options for both kinds of customers. The only product we haven't touched is the original brownie, cos who would want to change a killer product like that?

What is a Vegan product? This is a question thats frequently asked to us. There are folks who accuse us of not being vegan because we use refined flour and sugar in our products. And it's come up repeatedly too many times that I feel I have to write a blog on it.

Veganism is a way of life that strives to be as cruelty free as possible to animals. To this end, we avoid use of any kind of animal products or derivatives in our mixes especially the ones that are labeled as Vegan. For our vegan friendly mixes, we offer substitutions for dairy products that have to be added to the mixes to make it vegan.

A point of controversy that comes up quite frequently is that sugar is refined using bone char. We use regular table sugar or unrefined raw sugar for our mixes. Manufacturers in the Indian sugar industry use traditional activated/granular carbon or sulphur dioxide to refine sugar. Either ways no animal products are used in our sugar as well.

To us (or rather me) Veganism is not just about being kind to animals. It is also about being kind to one another, being conscious about ingredients, being economical with packaging (functional and attractive is what we go for), limiting excessive wastage of material and resources

It would be better to remember that its not Christmas everyday, and live accordingly. To a greener planet, and a better future :-)