The first thing that comes to mind is the ingredients used in a certain product. If you are hooked on being vegan, you should be familiar with certain names and terms already. As I progressed with my research, a lot of people were confused. Is Country Crock vegan?
Questions have been raised and there’s been much speculation. To get to the bottom of this, let’s find out about the composition of each Country Crock item. This is going to involve a lot of research, but if you’d like to know the exact answer, let’s get on with it. Where shall we start?
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Is Country Crock Vegan?
How Do You Know If Food Is Vegan?
A vegan diet simply means you avoid eating food that comes from animals or involves animal cruelty. To know if food is vegan, read the ingredients and, if possible, learn how it was made so that you can discover if there’s been any animal involvement.
Below are eight products from Country Crock. I have searched the ingredients of each of them to help me decide if it is VEGAN or NOT. Try to see the detailed list of ingredients for yourself.
Country Crock Buttery Spreads
The buttery spread consists of ingredients that come from soy, tapioca and palm plant. Vitamin A palmitate, Beta-Carotene, and vitamin D3 are also present. For the taste, they add purified water, salt, vinegar and natural flavors.
What raised my curiosity was the “natural flavors,” which the label described as being made from spices, fruits, vegetables, yeast, herbs, bark, bud, root, leaf or meat, seafood, poultry, eggs and dairy products.
There is no way I can find out which of these ingredients on the list create the natural flavors. As they indicate every product is a vegetable spread, this may mean a “natural vegetable flavor”.
I could easily have decided, after doing this research, that they were vegan. But it is a good thing I didn’t and tried instead to dig out more information about Vitamin D3. I found out it comes from two sources – fish liver oil or sheep wool oil. Disappointing, isn’t it?
- Therefore, for me, Country Crock Buttery Spreads are NOT VEGAN.
Country Crock Buttery Sticks
Country Crock Buttery Sticks largely have the same contents as the buttery spreads. The ingredients come from soybeans and palm plant. I noticed that the natural flavors are always there in every product, so there’s no need to mention them for the next product.
What bothers me is the “whey (milk)” ingredient. This is the liquid left after milk has been curdled and strained – milk that comes from a cow. They may have indicated conventional farming on their labels but it still comes from an animal.
- Therefore, for me, Country Crock Buttery Sticks are NOT VEGAN.
Country Crock Spreadable Butter with Canola Oil
This product contains butter (from cream milk and salt), canola oil, buttermilk, water salt and lactic acid. Cream and buttermilk are dairy products.
- Needless to say, Country Crock Spreadable Butter is NOT VEGAN.
Country Crock Flavored Spreads
This vegetable oil spread is made out of soybean, palm and canola plants. They make the sweetener from cornstarch in the form of corn syrup. These and the other ingredients in the list are supposed to be fine, but they include whey (milk) and honey.
Whey, as I have noted before, comes from cow’s milk, while honey, obviously, comes from bees. That’s two ingredients that come from animals.
- Therefore, Country Crock Flavored Spreads are NOT VEGAN.
The products above are the only ones I could find sold under the Country Crock brand. If there are more, I didn’t have time to find them out. However, based on these eight products, Country Crock is definitely NOT VEGAN.
It’s so easy to identify if food is vegan or not, you just look at the ingredients. But I can tell you, there is more to than that. It does not end there. It is hard to see behind the scenes.
The process of making the product from start to finish is very crucial. There are manufacturers that use animal testing to find out if the food is safe to eat. Who knows how many animals are dead as a result of this?
If you want to go further, let’s consider the packaging and other indirect materials. Where do the animals come in? Being vegan is embracing the principle that we should refrain from using animals for food, clothes or anything else that results in slaughter and cruelty.
- Read More: Is Soy Sauce Vegan?
With all of those concerns, we will now find ourselves rooting through our groceries so that we can look closely at the ingredients. It’s really hard, isn’t it?
