What were you thinking?, you may ask. VFC was perfect as it was, and you have gone and done what?
We tinkered with it. We did. And we know that some of you may not approve but we had good reasons, and we ask only that you hear us out.
Night Owls
Some recipes that you can make in a kitchen cannot be scaled up in a modern food manufacturing facility, and you’ll know that we did indeed start out knocking up batches of seitan in Adam’s restaurant kitchen. But then you lot wanted more and more of it, and we had our eyes on a big retail prize, and we just couldn’t keep up, even by adding a nightshift to the production rota. We needed to grow, and that meant we had to be flexible. Our new facility is brilliant. It can turn out as much tasty VFC in an hour as we could in a week at the restaurant. But the original seitan recipe could not be scaled up, and so we had a choice to make: continue to handcraft small batches of v.1 and sell it direct to rebels (D2R in business parlance) or change the recipe, go big and change the world. Readers, we went big.
Feeding Two Birds with One Scone
So, while we had to make some changes, we used the opportunity to go over all the feedback we’d received about v.1 – not from the I’d-Rather-Eat-My-Nan’s-Pants brigade but from our fellow freedom-fighting rebels. We wanted to make VFC even better, and we think we have done that. V.2 is more like the meat of chickens in both texture and appearance, and Adam has created a crispy coating so like the original – which everyone really loved – that we don’t think even the most highly sophisticated palates will be able to tell the difference. In short, we kept the bits you loved the best, and made the rest even better.
No Beating about the Bush
You may not realise it now but these changes are a good thing. We had to scale up. Our mission isn’t to make small batches of tasty food, it’s to end animal agriculture. And to do that, we have to be able to supply the biggest retail outlets where most people already shop. That’s why we have pushed our way into Tesco’s listings, and told the rest of the products to budge along a bit. And if you’ve seen VFC on the freezer shelves you’ll know that we are VERY hard to ignore. The whole point of this is that non-vegans see us, are intrigued by us, try us, love us and join us.
The Final Straw
V.3? Are you kidding? You just convinced us about v.2 and now you spring this on us.
Life is tough, rebels. You better get used to it. The truth is we are already working on v.3. We want to continue to create the very best products we can, made from ethical ingredients at an affordable price. This means we will have to keep changing. This is the way the world works, otherwise we’d all be driving a three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car and making phone calls by can-and-string.
Like A Rescued Factory Farmed Duck to Water
We know you already know why we are determined to make the best products possible: because we have to win over non-vegans. If committed vegans love VFC, that makes us very happy; if meat-eaters choose it over chickens, that makes us ecstatic, because that means fewer birds are being bred inside industrial facilities, then shipped to intensive sheds to live out a short, miserable existence before the inevitable terrifying end.
So, for those birds, please give v.2 a try, and when v.3 comes out, try that too. And when we launch our Spicy VFC in the New Year, stock up. Because we know you share our mission and our determination to create a kinder future, and maybe deep down, you might just come to admit that the latest VFC is actually better.
Now, dry those (eagle) eyes, and go and put the oven on. That VFC won’t cook itself.
