How PlantsPack classifies vegan places

PlantsPack uses four tiers for every venue. The line that matters most is the one between "100% vegan" and everything else. Here is what each tier means, how we verify entries, and what we explicitly do not include.

Last updated: 10 May 2026

100% vegan

The entire menu is plant-based. No meat, dairy, eggs, honey, or hidden animal ingredients. The kitchen handles no animal products. This is a strict bar and we apply it strictly. A restaurant that serves one non-vegan dish, even seasonally, is not 100% vegan and gets demoted.

For a place to be tagged 100% vegan with verification level 3 (admin-reviewed, the highest level), we open the venue's own website, read the menu, cross-reference at least one secondary source (HappyCow, local vegan blogs, vegan-business directories), and confirm currently open status. The full verification process is documented in our country audit posts.

Browse all 100% vegan places in Belgium · United Kingdom · or by country at /vegan-places.

Mostly vegan

The kitchen presents itself as vegan with a small number of clearly named non-vegan exceptions. For example, an otherwise plant-based bakery that uses one specific egg in one specific pastry, or a vegan kebab shop that sells halloumi as a topping. Mostly vegan is rare and means something specific. We do not use it as a soft "close to vegan" bucket.

A place described on its own site as "plant-based" without further specifics is usually vegan-friendly, not mostly vegan. We require the named-exception language to apply this tier.

Vegan-friendly

The venue is mostly omnivore but has a clearly labelled vegan section or several dedicated vegan items, not just one or two. Indian, Vietnamese, Thai, Lebanese and Italian restaurants often land here when they explicitly mark vegan items on the menu. Travel-staple chains like EXKi, Leon, Pret a Manger, Itsu, Caffe Nero qualify as vegan-friendly because they print VG icons across enough items to be a reliable vegan stop.

Vegan options

A mainstream venue with one or two vegan items on an otherwise omnivore menu. A pizza chain that has one vegan pizza, a burger place with one plant-based patty, a hotel restaurant with a single labelled main. Useful when you are travelling and need food, less useful as a destination.

Verification levels

Every place also carries a verification level from 0 to 3:

Level 0 (imported) — Pulled from public sources (OpenStreetMap, VegGuide, etc.) without further checking. Most of our long-tail entries.
Level 1 (sourced) — Same import, with at least one corroborating source noted.
Level 2 (AI-verified) — Cross-checked via web search and structured data parsing. The DB explicitly forbids AI-only promotion to 100% vegan; this level can confirm vegan-friendly or vegan-options claims but cannot upgrade something to fully vegan.
Level 3 (admin-reviewed) — Hand-checked against the venue's own website, cross-referenced against secondary sources, current operating status confirmed. This is the level we apply to 100% vegan listings during a country audit.

Every place page shows its current verification level and the date of the last review. If a level 3 verification is more than 12 months old, we re-check before claiming "currently open" in any external context.

What does not belong on PlantsPack

PlantsPack is a vegan discovery directory. Some intentional exclusions:

Vegetarian-with-eggs-and-dairy venues do not get listed. If a place is 100% vegetarian but uses dairy or eggs across the menu, it does not belong here. We respect those businesses; we just are not the directory for them.
Pizza, burger, fried chicken, and steakhouse chains where the platonic form of the dish is animal-centric — a vegan option does not earn a chain a listing if the brand is meat-defined. Independent restaurants with labelled vegan options on otherwise meat-heavy menus are case-by-case.
Closed venues. When two independent sources confirm a venue has closed, we archive it with a recorded reason. Stale listings are the single biggest data-quality problem for vegan directories — we work hard to avoid them.
Paid placements, sponsored listings, affiliate-driven rankings. PlantsPack runs no ads, accepts no payment for placement, and uses no affiliate links in our directory data. The order of places in any list is determined by data, not by sponsorship.

How we run country audits

A country audit means going through every listing tagged 100% vegan in that country, opening the venue's own website, cross-checking against secondary sources (HappyCow, local vegan blogs, vegan-business directories like Bevegan.be, The Bruges Vegan, Greenplace), and either confirming, demoting, or archiving. The audit usually catches three things:

Misclassified rows. Places tagged 100% vegan that turn out to be vegetarian-with-dairy or have a small non-vegan section. Demoted.
Closed venues. Places that have closed since the original import. Archived.
Missing entries. Real fully-vegan venues that were not in the import. Added with admin-review verification.

The first country fully audited end-to-end was Belgium in May 2026. The full writeup is at /blog/belgium-100-percent-vegan-audit. More countries to come.

Found a place we have classified wrong? Use the Suggest Correction button on any place page. Every correction goes to me directly.