Founded by Jane Land and Matthew Glover, the first event was January 2014.
Programme
Veganuary is a crowdfunded campaign to issue a challenge each January promoting eating vegan for the month. Participants sign up online and receive a downloadable "starter kit" and daily support emails. They're offered an online "vegan starter kit" with restaurant guides, product directories, and a recipe database. Participants are encouraged to share images and recipes to social media, which according to academic Alexa Weik von Mossner creates a sense of community and communicates the message that veganism is easy and fun.
Reception
Gentleman's Quarterly noted "it's a clever way to introduce a new way of nutritional thinking at a time of year where our mind is hardwired to explore ways to better ourselves". A January 2019 slump in UK pub receipts was blamed on Veganuary.
Impact
Tobias Leenaert postulated the popularity of the campaign may be partially due to the organizers' decision to promote "trying" veganism for a specific period vs. "going vegan", which allows participants to decide not to continue with an all-vegan diet without feeling as if they've failed. Von Mossner agrees and points to the "light-hearted" and generally positive tone of the promotional materials, which feature attractive and "frequently named animals" with captions like, "Save little Eric—Try Vegan this January" rather than images of animal abuse. 400,000 people signed up for the 2020 campaign. The campaign estimated this represented the carbon dioxide equivalent of 450,000 flights and the lives of more than a million animals. Signups for the 2019 event were reported to be as many as 14,000 per day for a total of 250,000 signups from 193 countries by the end of December. In 2018 170,000 people signed up, a 183% increase over 2017 numbers. For the 2017 campaign, 50,000 participants had signed up as of 4 January of that year.
Criticism
Von Mossner pointed out that downplaying facts about the lives and deaths of food animals omits important information and that the strict emphasis on food ignores veganism as a lifestyle.
