UniCafe to expand its vegan menu – 10 cent price incentive to be discontinued from 1 January 2025

UniCafe intends to expand its vegan menu in 2025 to two options five days a week. The aim is to make sustainable lunch choices even more accessible to customers than ever before. The cafe has used a 10 cent price incentive to encourage customers to choose vegan, but it has proved ineffective and will be discontinued from the 1st of January.

Since August 2020, UniCafes have served vegan food to students and university staff at a price 10 cents cheaper than other lunch options. At the beginning of 2023, the price incentive was extended to all customer groups.

By using dual pricing, UniCafe sought to support responsible and climate-friendly lunch choices, even though high-quality plant-based ingredients are not automatically cheaper than others.

However, the price incentive has proven an ineffective and costly way to drive purchasing behaviour: it costs around €330 per tonne of CO2e saved. For the sake of comparison, Ylva’s other emission reduction activities have been considerably more cost-effective: the 2023 guarantee of origin for zero-emission heat in Ylva’s property stock cost around €40 per tonne of CO2e, the low-carbon alternatives in the construction of Lyyra and Grand Hansa cost around €30 per tonne of CO2e, and the 2023 guarantee of origin for electricity from domestic wind power sources cost around €10 per tonne.

Currently, almost half of UniCafe’s customers choose a vegan lunch. In the future, the restaurant chain’s aim is to further increase the number of vegan alternatives in its daily menu and encourage customers to choose vegan whilst offering them a varied and diverse menu.

“Continuous development and diversification of the menu and increasing the number of vegan dishes available have been significantly more effective than the price incentive in increasing the consumption of vegan food. We sell almost 2 million lunches a year. As approximately half of these are vegan, we are talking about a very significant number per year, which we will channel more logically into a high-quality and attractive range of products,” says Anne Immonen, Business Director of Ylva’s restaurants.

Lunches that are good for the planet

Following a carbon footprint analysis of all its lunches in 2022, UniCafe has found that vegan food is the best option in terms of the impact on the climate and the earth in general.

According to the WWF Sweden One Planet Plate, a sustainable limit is 0.5 kg of CO2e per serving of lunch, and almost all portions below this limit are vegan. Since this discovery, UniCafe has worked systematically and in a data-driven way to further develop its vegan recipes.

While 30% of the lunches sold in 2020 were vegan, in 2024 the share of vegan lunches has reached 46% on average, with average emissions of 0.64 kg of CO2e per serving. In November 2024, UniCafes reached an impressive 49.8% of vegan lunches sold during the month, with average emissions of 0.62 kg per serving.

For UniCafe to reach the limit set for the One Planet Plate – that is, Climate Choice-labelled lunches – a further reduction of 0.14 kg of CO2e per portion on an annual average is required. Achieving this would reduce UniCafe’s annual emissions by around 15%, or 280 tonnes of CO2e.

Aiming for a high degree of domestic ingredients and sustainable choices

The domestic content of all UniCafe’s ingredients is around 53%. UniCafe favours domestic and high-quality plant proteins, and 91% of its plant-based protein products are made in Finland.

In 2024, Ylva carried out a study on the impact of the ingredients used in its restaurants in terms of their water footprint, carbon footprint and overall impact on nature. For all three, the findings supported a vegan diet. For some products, the production chain of plant proteins involves foreign ingredients, but the greater negative impact is linked to domestic meat, namely imported feed and the recurring environmental impacts.

“Vegan food should not be a speciality, but should appeal equally to everyone buying lunch, regardless of their dietary habits. Committed carnivores and omnivores present a huge potential that should not be wasted. Top-quality options that are suitable for a wide range of customers will encourage them to choose a vegan option,” Immonen says.

Product development, dialogue and advocacy

Increasing the availability of vegan food and maintaining a diverse menu will also require continuous product development in the future.

UniCafe’s vegan lunch menu is designed to be as varied as possible, to help as many customers as possible to find an option that appeals to them. The restaurant also responds to customer preferences by serving more of the dishes that have proved popular.

Customer feedback is important for product development and is actively collected both directly at the restaurants and online. Another factor driving the development of the dishes served are customers’ wishes. For example, right now UniCafe customers are looking for plant proteins that are not only nutritious but also stomach-friendly.

In addition to all the other actions it is taking, UniCafe is actively seeking to have a wider impact in promoting a sustainable food revolution. In 2023, Ylva became a founding member of the Finnish food association Pro Vege. Pro Vege’s mission is to increase the demand for and supply of plant-based and vegan food by bringing together a wide range of actors in the Finnish food industry. By being a member, UniCafe is involved in influencing the suppliers of ingredients, and the food industry in general, to promote the availability of plant protein products that are made from domestic ingredients.

Additional information:

Anne Immonen
Business Director of Ylva
+358 40 512 5008
anne.immonen@ylva.fi