What PlantsPack Actually Is: A Vegan Discovery Platform, Four Weeks In

PlantsPack is a discovery platform built around how vegans actually live and travel. The food discovery is a natural result of that focus, not the starting point.

This post is an honest look at what the platform is right now, what the data actually looks like, and where we are taking it. (More on who built it and why on the About page.)

What's in the database

Four weeks since launch, we have over 52,500 places across 150+ countries and 1,500+ cities with enough density to rank. The data comes primarily from OpenStreetMap and VegGuide - open databases built by vegan communities over many years. We aggregated, classified, and cleaned it. We didn't manufacture it from scratch.

Here's how those places break down by vegan level:

• 100% Vegan - ~8,700 places. The entire menu is plant-based. Zero animal products.
• Mostly Vegan - ~3,600 places. Predominantly vegan menus with a small number of animal items - places in transition, or where one dish doesn't match the rest.
• Vegan-Friendly - ~35,000 places. Genuine vegan sections or dedicated dishes, but also serves non-vegan food.
• Has Vegan Options - ~4,800 places. Mainstream spots where you can find something to eat.

The biggest category is Vegan-Friendly, and that reflects reality. Most places a vegan traveler actually eats at are not 100% vegan restaurants. We include them because being useful matters more than being pure about it.

It is also the messiest category, and we should be honest about that. Vegan-Friendly is where misclassified places end up most often - a vegetarian burger place where every burger has a vegan variant lives in the same bucket as a kebab shop with one falafel option, even though those experiences are not remotely similar. The line between Vegan-Friendly (genuine section, 4+ dedicated vegan dishes) and Has Vegan Options (1-3 vegan items in a mainstream place) is sharper in theory than in source data, where a single OpenStreetMap tag like diet:vegan=yes does not always tell us which side of the line a place is really on. We are continuously reclassifying - in our most recent cleanup pass, over 4,000 places moved between tiers based on name patterns, descriptions, web-search verification, and community corrections, while another 1,700 stale or duplicate listings were archived - and the bucket will stay the noisiest until we have more verified reviews from people who have actually eaten at these places.

Explore all of them on the vegan places map or browse vegan places by location.

The honest part: data quality

Most of these listings are unverified. They've been imported from open-source databases and tagged by their original contributors. We have not individually confirmed that each place is still open, still vegan, or accurately described.

Right now, only a small number of places have been admin-reviewed or community-confirmed. We're running automated verification in the background - scanning menus via web search and cross-referencing community contributions - but that process is ongoing and will take time.

What this means in practice: some listings will be outdated. Some places will have closed. Some vegan levels will need correcting. This is the working state of an active database, not a polished finished product.

If you find something wrong, the Suggest Correction button on every place page sends it directly to us. Every correction improves the database for everyone.

How vegan levels are assigned

Every place carries one of the four labels above. The most important line is between 100% Vegan and everything else. We try to be strict about that label - a restaurant that serves one non-vegan dish is not 100% vegan, even if it was before. Mostly Vegan exists precisely for those cases.

For places below that line, we rely on source data, descriptions, and community corrections. The classification is improving continuously as verification runs and corrections come in.

How city scores work

Every city with at least 5 listed places gets a Vegan Score. The score is a weighted blend of four dimensions, each visible per city in the rankings table:

• Accessibility - vegan places per capita, adjusted for city size. A small town with three excellent fully-vegan spots can outscore a megacity where you have to travel an hour to find one.
• Choice - how many distinct cuisines and categories are represented. A city with one Thai, one Mexican, one bakery, and one café scores higher than a city with the same number of places all serving the same thing.
• Variety - the mix across restaurants, shops, and stays. A city that has vegan stores and accommodations alongside restaurants is more livable for vegans, not just more visitable.
• Quality - review ratings combined with verification status. A few five-star verified spots count for more than ten unverified four-star ones.

A small disclosure: we live in a Belgian village of about 60,000 people with two genuinely good vegan-friendly spots. When we first ran the formula, that village ranked above Berlin. It was directionally honest (per capita, our village really is well-served) but it did not match how anyone actually plans a trip. That tension between "where it is easy to live vegan" and "where it is good to travel as a vegan" is what we are still tuning.

It is not a perfect signal. Cities with strong OSM coverage (most of Europe, large US cities) will rank more accurately than smaller cities with sparser data, and a low grade often means "we do not have enough data here yet" more than "this city is bad for vegans." Every grade has the underlying numbers visible so you can judge for yourself.

The grades got more granular recently - A+/A/A-/B+/.../F- instead of just letters - because the coarse version was hiding real differences between cities sitting at the boundary of two grades.

What's already built

Places are the foundation, but the platform has grown since launch.

Packs are live - curated collections of places around a theme, city, or trip. Follow packs from the team and other users, or build your own.

Trips are live - plan and save a vegan travel itinerary, connect places across cities into a route, and share your travel lists with others.

Community is active - reviews, check-ins, posts, and direct contributions to the data are all available. The social feed, follows, and community packs are working.

Ideas for what's coming next

AI Vegan Assistant - a tool specifically trained on vegan knowledge: ingredient checking, restaurant research, travel prep, finding out whether a menu item is actually vegan. Not a generic chatbot. Something that understands the difference between 'plant-based' and 'vegan.'

Mobile app - the map experience is already mobile-optimised in the browser, but a native app is on the roadmap. Offline access, push notifications for new places near you, faster trip planning.

Smarter discovery - better search relevance, feed ranking based on your interests, and recommendations that improve the more you use the platform.

You directly shape what gets built

This is still early. Nothing about the roadmap above is locked - it reflects what we believe is most valuable based on the problem we are solving. If you disagree, or if we are missing something obvious, we want to know.

We're building this in the open. The data is imperfect, sometimes wrong, and improving every day. If that's the kind of product you want to exist, use it, break it, and tell us where it fails. Leave a comment below or reach out via the Contact page. If enough people ask for something, it moves up the list. That is how the last six weeks of changes actually got prioritised.

The full roadmap is public.