The business hopes the low prices will encourage more people to go plant-based at lunch-time
A PLANT-BASED food truck in the centre of Cardiff has slashed the price of its entire menu to £5 to encourage people to try vegan meals.
Plant-based Paradise, based outside Queen’s Arcade on Working Street, also wants to help customers struggling to eat out due to the cost of living.
“It’s looking positive so far. We’ve been busy pretty much every day,” said co-owner Aaron Wong.
“We’ve served a lot of meat eaters over the last two weeks, people we’ve never even met before. All I want to do is just get people to come and try the food and if they like it, they like it.”
The business, which opened in 2015 as Anna Loka, Cardiff’s first fully vegan restaurant before turning to street food, has set its menu to £5, reducing the cost of some items by over 50%.
“During January we had no money, we literally couldn’t eat out anywhere and I think that’s the same for everyone,” said Mr Wong.
“The town was dead, no one was going out, they didn’t have any money at all. So I thought I’ll do something different. I’ll put everything to a fiver, make sure people are getting money’s worth and see how it gets on.
The business has gone from “barely scraping” £40 in January to seeing an average of 40 customers a day, and often selling out of food.
‘I fell in love with the food truck the moment I saw it’
This follows a difficult 2024 for Anna Loka, which saw the plant-based business close the doors of its Albany Road restaurant after nine years.
“I had the idea that the restaurant was going to go at some point, it was inevitable,” said Mr Wong, blaming rising costs after Brexit.
As a precaution, the 25-year-old had bought a food truck two years earlier. “I fell in love with it the moment I saw it.”
He spent the 2024 festival season serving food at pop-up locations throughout the UK, but Anna Loka’s future was still up in the air.
Mr Wong had just completed a training week at the Tesco warehouse in Newport when he got the call that the food truck had the go-ahead to open in Cardiff city centre, just in time for a “rammed” Christmas period.
However, when they began serving again for Veganuary, a historically busy month for the company, business was poor.
“The first three weeks of January were absolutely worthless,” Mr Wong said. “I was thinking to myself maybe we should give it up. It clearly wasn’t working.”
Seeing people struggling to eat out and noticing corporate companies selling cheap food, Mr Wong had the “epiphany” to lower his prices.
He noticed trends on social media of people seeing how much food they could buy with a £10 budget but didn’t see anyone doing it with £5.
“I thought, If I put everything as a £5 thing and see how it goes then maybe it will be okay. What I want is, if people see a five pound note in their pocket, they come to us.”
Mr Wong will have to wait a few more weeks to see if the low prices are financially viable but hopes to continue for as long as possible.
‘Our reputation is really important to us’
The food truck is not the only vegan food company that has been struggling.
“Cardiff doesn’t have enough vegan demand to survive. That’s obvious because a lot of vegan business have shut down,” Mr Wong said.
“I wondered if the whole vegan thing was dying off.”
The rising price of plant-based ingredients, plus the time and effort it takes to make vegan food, had affected the industry, he added.
Despite the effort that goes into making the final product, they refuse to buy-in any food ready made.
“We refuse to lower standards simply because we operate from a truck. Our reputation is important to us,” said Mr Wong.
‘If we don’t eat it, we don’t sell it, simple as’
“I just really hate that vegan food gets a really bad rep. It’s not what people think it is, that’s the thing.
“Social media has made the word ‘vegan’ something that people don’t want to see. When people see the word they’re put off.”
Mr Wong said this had led many food companies to use the term “plant-based’ so as to not detract customers. This was something he did on the food truck for Anna Loka.
“I think the biggest issue for vegan food is the fact that people are too scared or they’ve had a bad experience because a lot of people have tried to jump on the bandwagon where they’re trying to make a good profit off vegan food.”
The menu rotates to include burgers, wraps, salad bowls, mac and cheese and more with Mr Wong and his business partner Kai Sales spending months testing recipes before trialing them.
“If we don’t eat it, we don’t sell it, simple as,” said Mr Sales.
More information can be found on the Anna Loka website, Instagram and Facebook.
