Pret opens second Veggie-only shop next week!

Great news - after the massive success of the Veggie-only Pret a Manger which opened last June Pret promised to convert more of their stores to be veggie-only.

Today they delivered on that promise and revealed the location of the next store they would convert to veggie-only will be their Great Eastern Street store in Shoreditch, London, UK. And it'll be open for business in less than a week - 4th April. They'll also be bringing their Veggie campaign over to the USA at the end of April.

The Shoreditch location was chosen due to the high levels of veggie sales already happening at their store, which isn't surprising as Shoreditch is rapidly becoming a vegan hub and is home to several vegan restaurants such as Fed By Water, Home, Cook Daily, What The Pitta and Redemption.

Pret's CEO Clive Schlee states:

We opened our Veggie Pret pop up as an experiment last year, never imagining it would be around for more than a month. We ended up making it permanent and I can now tell you that our second Veggie Pret will open at Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch on 4th April. A lot of Pret staff wanted their shops to go Veggie, but Great Eastern St got the call up based on the high levels of vegetarian sales in the area.

Since changing their store in Soho, London to offer exclusively Vegetarian/Vegan items:

• Sales have skyrocketed over a staggering 70 percent.
• Shop is so busy some customers sit on the floor.
• The CEO noted "A meat free environment seems to generate an infectious positive energy".
• Although vegetarian items are sold, the top 8 best selling items sold are all completely vegan.

The original plan was to run the store as an experiment and close it after 4 weeks, and Pret actually expected to see sales drop at the store drop by 30% but instead their sales increased by over 70% and they decided to convert more of their stores to be veggie-only.

You’ve been asking for more vegetarian and vegan options and our chefs have been experimenting with new ingredients and flavours to meet the challenge. We’ll open Great Eastern Street with 20 new recipes on the menu, including a vegan Macaroni Cheese – which has taken our team the best part of a year to perfect – and a vegan chocolate brownie.

And good news for readers in the US too, with Pret's CEO confirming:

It seems the movement for eating less meat continues to grow. The next stop for Pret will be the US, where we’ll be launching a new veggie range in all our US shops at the end of April.