vanilla bean plant-based food 4+

Love this!

Compared to other apps like HappyCow, this is by far my favorite vegan restaurant app. This app is so easy to navigate! I also like how it shows places where items can be altered in order to be vegan-friendly. Every restaurant has little icons to show whether it’s vegan and vegetarian-friendly, has gluten-free dishes, serves raw food and fair-trade ingredients, and many other things. This app is a must have for people with specialty diets!! And it’s free😱

Ripoff

This app seems to be a rip off of HappyCow, but it has no user reviews, photos or any of the vibrancy from happy cow. I’ll stick with Happy Cow to keep the vegan community strong, keep all the restaurant and food information fresh and consolidated in the place where they exist now. The price of the Happy Cow app is tiny compared to the value it provides and it’s less than what I tip a great waiter at a restaurant anyway. I wish I could give more to happy cow for all the great meals it’s provided me and my family.

I wish vanilla bean would focus on the unmet needs of the community instead.... there are so many! It must be so hard to come to work everyday to work on someone else’s idea, and to live in the shadow of another app that works well and has served the vegan community since for 20 years. In my experience it’s much more fun and gratifying to work on original ideas and to be innovative, creative and ground-breaking. Investors almost never make money from investing in copy cats, and creators almost never get satisfaction from replication.

As someone who’s been In the restaurant business I am amazed at how many people use happycow across the world and how many millions of Happy Cow stickers are on the windows of local businesses across the world. I can never see that vibrant network being recreated by Vanilla Bean unfortunately... there’s no community in the app either.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your review, TV Viking. As with everything in the world, there’s not only one option for one thing. There’s not only one newspaper, not only one kind of potato and not only one mobile device. And we think that’s great because people are different and have different tastes and priorities. At vanilla bean, we offer our service for free and with different filters to find organic, local, gluten-free and raw food. New reviews and photos come in daily thanks to the great community. We would love you to give us a second try. If HappyCow works better for you, of course that’s fine too!

Inaccurate and unmaintained

I downloaded this app to prepare for my trip to San Diego and not knowing any restaurants down there. It was helpful in finding vegan restaurants. Returning home and reviewing what this app offered, there were a lot of no-longer-existent restaurants on the map. They are quick to remove them when brought to their attention. But a lot of fully vegan restaurants in my community are not on the map, and despite suggestions to add them, they haven’t been. All the overwhelming “Omni” selections on the map is disappointing knowing their only offering is typically an Impossible burger. It’s helpful to know where you can go with your non-vegan friends, but this app isn’t helpful when it excludes so many fully vegan restaurants for you to go to without having to go to a meat restaurant. Also the app frequently tells you there is no internet connection, but the internet connection is fine and you can access other apps. I just found another app that has all the locations I’ve suggested to Vanilla Bean that they don’t have. So I’m giving up on this one and switching to that one. I wonder what I missed in San Diego, knowing now they missed 80% of what’s in my own area.