Shu Kudo

Making vegan living easier! Supporting daily life around a recipe site

“Vegan” is a lifestyle of eating no animal-derived foods at all: not only meat and eggs, but also dairy products such as milk and even dashi broth made from bonito flakes. With growing awareness of health, animal welfare, and environmental issues, more people in Japan are adopting it.

Still, partly because it is not as widely known as “vegetarian,” meaning a lifestyle or person avoiding meat and seafood, there is often “nothing to eat” when eating out. And with limited ingredients, cooking at home is a constant struggle.

Vcook, a recipe posting site for vegan dishes, solves the worries of people living vegan. Launched in July 2019, Vcook had about 2,000 recipes posted by users as of January 2021, and about 95,000 unique users a month. Recipes are also posted on Instagram, with about 63,000 followers.

“The recipe posting site Vcook has also become a big community of people living vegan. So we also run a business supporting marketing for companies doing business in the vegan market, starting with food manufacturers.

Through interviews with users, product PR, and more, we help companies gather the real voices of people who have adopted a vegan lifestyle. We also give talks at companies to share the worries and wishes of vegans.”

So says Shu Kudo, Representative Director of Vcook Inc.

“What has been consistent since launching the service is the wish ‘to make vegan life easier’ and ‘to let people start a vegan lifestyle more casually.’

The recipe site is a big pillar of that, but going a step further, we will start a service delivering prepared meals in February 2021.”

The new service, named “Vcook Deli,” regularly delivers six frozen prepared meals, responding to requests such as “I don’t have time to cook” and “I want to eat vegan meals at work too.”

At the planning stage, this service won the OIH Award at “Mirainno Pitch 2020,” held by Osaka Innovation Hub. The plan was refined further, and the service launched in February 2021 when everything was ready.

Starting from a sense of “injustice,” and even traveling around Japan to gather peers’ voices

Kudo is a current student at Kobe University’s Faculty of Global Human Sciences. Kudo started living vegan in the third year of high school, prompted by seeing a cat that had been run over by a car. But Kudo says it was only “the final push.”

“I learned about global warming in social studies at school and became interested in environmental issues. As I researched, I learned that many environmental problems have the aspect of developed countries’ activities putting the burden on developing countries.

I felt an indescribable injustice in burdens being imposed one-sidedly just because people happened to be born in different places. I felt the same about animals, and I just couldn’t accept that animals are treated differently, such as livestock versus pets.

Those vague feelings I had long had burst out all at once, and after thinking about whether there was something I could do, I decided to ‘live vegan.’ From the next day, I declared ‘I won’t eat meat, fish, eggs, or milk’ and started living vegan.”

Still, Kudo had almost no detailed knowledge about veganism at the time. Not knowing what to eat, Kudo laughs, “For two weeks I lived only on rice balls and a pot of simmered vegetables.”

Later, at an event for people living vegan, Kudo learned that “you can eat hamburger steak and omurice too” by cleverly cooking soy meat made from processed soybeans, yuba, tofu, and more, and gradually enriched a vegan life. Having gone through that struggle, Kudo came to feel more strongly than anyone the wish to “make vegan life easier! More information!”

After entering Kobe University, Kudo found that the campus cafeteria had vegetarian and halal menus, but the only vegan option was stir-fried vegetables, so Kudo negotiated with the co-op that runs the cafeteria and got vegan menus introduced.

Then, through a connection with the owner of a vegan café in Kobe, Kudo was entrusted with managing the café.

“That was when I learned how a shop is run, including sales and expenses. Until then, I had worked only on the wish to ‘make vegan easier!’, but I learned that to achieve that goal, it is important to secure sales and keep it going as a business.

At the same time, I came to want to achieve the goal by joining forces with people living vegan not only in Kobe but across Japan.”

With that in mind, Kudo set a goal: “Meet people living vegan across Japan in person, talk with them, and gather 100 peers.” Over two months, Kudo traveled from Hokkaido to Okinawa, talking with people about the worries and hopes of vegan life.

With the peers met there at the core, Kudo first founded an NPO. The idea of creating a recipe site that came out of it led to Vcook Inc.

Using crowdfunding to gather funds, ideas, and peers

To travel around Japan, Kudo raised funds through crowdfunding (CF). Kudo also used CF to develop the Vcook Deli service mentioned above, and to publish a vegan recipe book.

“One organizational model I like is the ‘cooperative,’ like a co-op.

In a cooperative, people with a shared sense of a problem put up money themselves and create the products they want. Then they use the finished products themselves. I like that people act on their own to solve problems and take responsibility.

CF has something in common with that. You can support services and products you think are good by putting money in, and when they are finished, you can actually use them. I think it is a very good system in that it brings together peers who share a sense of the problem.”

Kudo also points out that CF has a big effect in terms of marketing. With CF, services and products that win sympathy can steadily raise funds, but if they do not, money is hard to raise.

“You can check whether what you think is good is really good, and whether you are being self-centered,” says Kudo. Making full use of CF to gather funds, ideas, and peers, Kudo has shown the strengths of the digital native generation to the fullest.

About starting the company, Kudo says, “Starting a business wasn’t the goal. I wanted to solve the problems people had, and starting a business just happened to be the best way to do that.”

“I started the company while still a student, so I didn’t know business manners and couldn’t even hand over a business card properly. There was so much I didn’t know about the working world, and it was really hard at first. So I think it is better to start a business after gaining experience as a working adult.

But among the members who had worked together since the NPO days, the one with the smallest risks, such as jobs and families, was me, a university student. In the worst case, even if I failed, I could just go back to university if it was only me.

So I thought I would start the company on behalf of everyone.”

Kudo founded the company carrying the troubles surrounding vegan life and the wishes of many people who want to solve them. That is exactly why Kudo is committed to getting the business firmly on track and keeping it going.

“The recipes posted on Vcook are full of feelings of care for friends and wishes for family members’ health.

If we cannot continue the business, the recipe site’s server will stop. If the server stops, even those precious recipes will be lost. We absolutely must avoid that.

That is exactly why we want to manage the company soundly so that we can keep the service running forever.”

Carefully solving the worries of people in need will surely “hit home”

Kudo, who has spread a circle of vegan peers and recipe site users across Japan, looks back on the work so far: “Trying hard to understand the first few people was the start of everything.”

“I didn’t plan a nationwide service like today’s from the beginning. I listened carefully to the people in front of me who were struggling and thought through solutions carefully without rushing.

I want to keep pursuing ‘helping people in trouble smile’ without changing. I think that, as a result, it will grow into a service that hits home and pleases people with similar worries.

Just as eco bags and reusable bottles have become established as choices for the environment, I want to create a society where vegan is not something special but exists as one perfectly ordinary choice.”

To that end, the goal is for Vcook to grow into Japan’s top vegan recipe site, expand the Vcook Deli menu, and become established as infrastructure for vegan life.

Veganism is spreading worldwide, but awareness in Japan still cannot be called high. Finally, we asked Kudo, who has experienced the resulting struggles and is working to solve them, about “the appeal of vegan life.”

“Meeting peers I can share values with. And one more: rather than ‘noticing but looking away or doing nothing’ about animal welfare and environmental issues, ‘worrying in my own way, facing them, and first being able to take a step forward.’

It is certainly inconvenient, but being able to act on my sense of the problem has cleared away the vague unease I had carried for so long. So I feel much easier and lighter than before.”