Editor's choice
The Herbivorous Butcher
#2nd Best choice
Very Good Butchers
#3rd Best Choice
No Evil Foods
It's a meatless online shopping extravaganza! Whether you're based in Los Angeles, New York, North Carolina, or anywhere else in the United States or Canada, there's a meatless butcher's shop to suit.
Today's "meats" taste better than ever before and offer up some serious health and environmental benefits — they also taste incredible. Ready to stick your fork into something juicy? Let's get started with our favorite meatless butcher's store, Herbivorous.
Our Top Vegan Butcher Shops
1. The Herbivorous Butcher (Editor's Choice)
- Best match for: Small batch meat and cheese sans the meat and cheese.
Brother and sister team Aubry and Kale Walch bring you a range of delicious meat-free meat and cheese-free cheese via the Herbivorous Butcher portal.
Although physically based in Minneapolis MN, the vegan butcher shop also ships its products to all 50 states and Puerto Rico. If you live locally, deliveries are available through GrubHub and DoorDash.
Shoppers can choose between buying a la carte style and filling their online cart, or selecting one of the shop's larger box options.
The Vegan Starter Kit, for example, features seven different vegan meat options such as the 13-ounce maple sage vegan sausage.
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2. Very Good Butchers
- Best match for: Monthly "meat" deliveries for hungry vegans.
One of the hardest things about being a vegan in a small town or isolated region is the lack of quality meat alternatives.
Heading to a BBQ with a salad is fine, of course, but sometimes you want to show up with something, well, meatier in hand.
Very Good Butchers offer a fantastic monthly meat service that ensures no matter where you are in the country, you have access to high-quality "meats."
Handcrafted in British Columbia, the company's products are made from beans, grains, and vegetables.
The butcher shop can ship your vegan meats throughout Canada and the United States.
We recommend the BBQ pulled jackfruit for both flavor and texture.
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3. No Evil Foods
- Best match for: A vegan butcher's shop with excellent environmental credentials.
Buy as many of No Evil Food's vegan meat products as you can at one time to cut down on shipping -related environmental costs. That's the message from the bold team at NEF. The company puts a real emphasis on environmentally sound practices and we love them for it.
Each shipment arrives in bio-degradable and recyclable packaging. The meat, meanwhile, is encased in fully compostable unbleached cotton. Even the ink that forms the company's logo and the product's name is plant-based. No evil indeed.
Choose from the company's five core products, which all feature names such as El Capitan and The Pit Boss. At certain times of the year, you can also buy The Pardon, a vegan roast to end all others.
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4. Impossible
- Best match for: Vegans after a flexible product that tastes just like beef.
Grill the burgers, fry the mince for tacos or make a mean bolognese sauce, anything you can do with beef mince, you can do with Impossible's meat substitute.
The company, founded by Stanford University Professor Dr. Patrick Brown, is best known for its burgers, which burst onto the scene in 2016.
The Impossible also creates vegan fish and dairy products. But at the moment, the company's online grocery store only sells the original "beef" product.
Each serving contains a generous 19 grams of protein and 14 grams of fat but zero nasty cholesterol.
Vegans across the world love how Impossible has helped the fast food industry change, so having this vegan butcher online is a definite boon.
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Why Go Vegan?
If you're not a vegan already but are thinking of making some serious changes to your diet, there are some compelling arguments for veganism. Even if you're not ready to fully switch to a meat and dairy-free lifestyle, enacting changes on a few days of the week can make a big difference.
In terms of the environment, the meat and dairy industries are responsible for a hefty toll. The degeneration of soil (a finite resource), the vast amounts of water and grain needed to maintain the animals, and the clearing of forests to make room for more animals or to create land to grow animal feed all contribute to our current ecological crisis.
There are also ethical reasons for making a change to your diet. Many vegans are inherently opposed to the slaughter of animals for human consumption and the ways in which mass-scale farming rears animals.
When it comes to your health, there is plenty of research to suggest that a well-balanced plant-based diet is superior in many respects. According to the Vegan Society, a plant-based diet may "lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and lower rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer."
The Rise of Meatless Meats
So, what is vegan meat? In line with growing knowledge around the benefits of plant-based eating, the last decade has seen a cascade of new"meat" products hitting the shelves. Of course, there were always some substitutes available (remember Quorn, TVP, and veggie burgers) but today's supermarkets and specialty stores offer much more in terms of both choice and flavor.
And it's not just plant-based meats making headway into the diets of Americans. Lab-grown meat is set to become the next big innovation. Clever technological solutions mean researchers can now grow hamburger meat and even steaks in a laboratory from proteins taken from a live animal. The best bit is that the animal donating those proteins doesn’t need to die and continues to live a healthy life.
While the cost to grow a steak in a lab is currently too high to be a viable consumer option, commentators think clean, ethical meat could be on our shelves very soon. Watch this space!
FAQS
It might sound like an oxymoron at first since vegans do not eat meat. But vegan butcher shops are a growing trend. These stores stock vegan alternatives to traditional meats and meat products. While traditional butcher shops might sell pork sausages, a vegan butcher shop stocks pea-protein sausages.
Frequently, yes, going to the butcher's can be cheaper than buying your meat (or meat alternatives) from a supermarket. This is, of course, entirely dependent on which supermarket and butcher's store you frequent.
As they say, different strokes for different folks. Likewise, one vegan's preferred meat alternative might not be the next vegan's favorite. In terms of health, pea protein products pack a nutritional punch as do meat alternatives made from seitan. Other vegan favorites include mushrooms, beans, lentils, and tempeh.
The Best Meat-Free Butcher
In our opinion, you can't go wrong with Herbivorous for delicious vegan meats, plus the selection of cheeses pushes the company ahead of the competition even more.
That said, all the companies on our list should be lauded for producing healthy, ethical, and environmentally sound foods that taste great.
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The Herbivorous Butcher
Our #1 Recommendation