We've Been Looking for Pre-Vegans in the Wrong Places

What a six-month Te Protejo report I worked on reveals about who's actually ready for diet change

Many of us have a standard playbook for identifying who’s ready to change their diet: segment by diet stage (omnivore, flexitarian, vegetarian, vegan) and target the middle, because they’re the ones most responsive to advocacy tactics. Rinse, wash, repeat. But I’ve recently conducted a study that has made me question this framework: maybe we need to think beyond the idea of flexitarians as pre-vegans and consider other groups as well.

To help answer this question, we may need to look not at the dinner table, but in our bathroom cabinets.

I Ran a Six-Month Study. Here’s What Surprised Me.

When I’m not writing Substack posts, I’m writing research reports¹. Last week, I published a new report commissioned from Te Protejo to evaluate the success of their new program, Tu Compromiso Cruelty-Free (“Your Cruelty-Free Commitment”). The six-month program provided participants curious about cruelty-free² (CF) cosmetics with structured resources, including practical guides, webinars, community groups, and curated educational materials about vegan foods, clothes, and makeup brands. Think Veganuary, targeted at women in Latin America, and about cruelty-free products as well.

To measure impact, I sent out surveys at three points — before, midway through, and after the program — to 539 participants who consistently engaged with program materials. And the program was a success! Participants significantly reduced their animal product consumption, with several flexitarians and vegetarians becoming fully vegan by the end of the six-month period. My calculations indicate that program participants are now eating 65 fewer pigs, 163 fewer chickens, 78 fewer fish, and half a cow less annually.

I’ve written extensively about diet challenges before — I’ve found that they tend to convert 10% to 28% of participants to long-term dietary change and that they’re optimal for converting people who are already a few steps along the “vegan pipeline”. The same was true for the Cruelty-Free challenge: about 30% of participants were vegan at the start of the program, and 70%³ reported buying only Cruelty-Free cosmetics.

But here’s the thing that really stuck with me: none of the demographic details I tested — age, country, motivations — predicted who would succeed in the Tu Compromiso program. But there was something that did: people who entered the program already buying cruelty-free cosmetics exclusively were more than twice as likely⁴ to be vegan by the end — 45.2% versus 21.7%.

This really surprised me. I expected that initial motivations especially would predict success, or maybe one’s country. This finding sent me down a rabbit hole (don’t worry, the rabbit was cruelty-free). If CF buyers are twice as likely to go vegan, how many of them are actually out there?

The Market Nobody Thought to Count

Just like in determining the real number of vegans in the world, it’s hard to tell how many women are cruelty-free. To help get to the bottom of it, I charted all the surveys that asked about it here:

As we can see, the numbers vary quite a bit — especially given that the survey questions asked about both current and hypothetical purchases. Another wrinkle here is that people may overreport socially desirable actions in surveys, meaning these percentages are likely an overestimate. Given this, I think it’s reasonable to assume that between 10 and 40% of women buy Cruelty-Free products with some amount of intentionality, although I’d want better data to say for certain. What I can say is that Cruelty-Free cosmetics are already making waves in the beauty aisles: the Cruelty-Free market is expected to nearly double within the next ten years.

As with veganism, CF shoppers are more motivated by morals than by personal incentives. A 2025 study found that altruism — defined as an internalized concern for animal welfare, not peer pressure or social media influence — is the strongest predictor of cruelty-free purchasing behavior. Another study found that ethical concerns were a stronger predictor of cruelty-free purchases than even social norms. However, people’s ethics only drive purchases when the products are priced at or slightly above those tested on animals. It’s easy to see the overlaps with veganism, right? Ethically-driven, sometimes more expensive for an exact alternative (although, as I’ve pointed out before, vegan diets are still cheaper on average), requiring a label to buy. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course: eliminating meat consumption is harder than swapping makeup brands, and meat is far more cultural than shades of blush.

Here’s the kicker: 39% of women who only buy vegan beauty products are not actually vegan⁵. Another twist is that many CF shoppers don’t have a perfect understanding of what it actually entails — in one survey, only about half of participants correctly defined “cruelty-free” and “vegan” cosmetics. Taken together, this means that there is a large segment of shoppers who are buying cruelty-free products, eat a lot of meat, and may be perfect candidates for diet change.

Let’s do some back-of-the-napkin math here. If we take the percentage of shoppers who buy cruelty-free from the largest survey above (35%), multiply by the total number of potential cosmetics shoppers in the world (4.2 billion), and remove the ones who are already vegan (61%), we have: nearly 900 million people who buy cruelty-free but aren’t vegan. Heck, let’s do the math with the most conservative estimate of people who buy cruelty-free, 9%. That’s still nearly a quarter of a billion people.

Now, I’m not trying to overstate this and say that Cruelty-Free shoppers are the silver bullet we’ve been looking for⁶. But the success of a Cruelty-Free program means we should identify more non-diet-related behaviors that predict a smooth transition to low- or no-meat diets.

Three Kinds of Pre-Vegan We Keep Ignoring

Historically, we’ve focused on moving flexitarians through the diet-change pipeline — they’re the ones most responsive to advocacy tactics. Sometimes we’ve identified demographic characteristics that make someone more likely to go vegan, such as being left-leaning, female, or Black. But this study has made me want to reframe the question: Instead of asking “who are the right people to target?”, we should also ask “what are the right behaviors to look for?” CF cosmetics purchasing is certainly one. But how many others are there?

I’d group ideal " pre-vegans” loosely into three buckets, each defined by a different asset they already have. The first is proximity — flexitarians and vegetarians who are already partway there in their diets. Easy enough.

The second is capacity — people who’ve already demonstrated they can change an ingrained habit based on their values. Fast fashion quitters, plastic-free converts, people who’ve given up flying for climate reasons, faux fur adopters. The logic is grounded in basic behavioral psychology: people who’ve already overridden a habit for values reasons have higher confidence they can do it again — and self-efficacy is the strongest predictor of behavior change.

The third is empathy — people who already extend active moral concern to individual animals outside of diet. Here we have our shelter dog adopters, people who’ve stopped going to zoos or circuses, fair trade shoppers, and people who rescue strays. Research consistently shows that individual animal empathy is the most durable long-term predictor of sustained vegan diets.

These categories aren’t mutually exclusive: Cruelty-Free shoppers would fit into capacity and empathy buckets, for example. But it should help us broaden the idea of the vegan pipeline: we’ve historically focused almost exclusively on diet proximity, but Tu Compromiso Cruelty-Free suggests the buckets may be just as promising — and almost entirely untapped.

This also means we should expand the idea of a “diet challenge” beyond diet. They’re usually built around the assumption that diet is the entry point. But what if it isn’t? Tu Compromiso Cruelty-Free suggests the bathroom cabinet could be an entry point. There are probably many more challenge ideas out there that can be set up as funnels towards meat reduction: zero-waste challenges, fast-fashion detoxes, adopt-don’t-shop campaigns, fair-trade swap challenges, or Plastic-Free July.

What Comes Next

We know how to talk to flexitarians — heck, we’ve built entire organizations around that pipeline. We haven’t built the equivalent for the devout birdwatcher, the faux-fur convert, the man who dropped fast fashion cold turkey, the woman who religiously checks fair-trade certifications before buying chocolate. We’ve been working with a narrower definition of “pre-vegan” than the evidence supports.

We need more programs to identify these behavioral fingerprints, try new things, and help people along the routes to diet change. The data suggests it’ll work.

Thank you!

Thank you for reading! I always make these resources available for free, but please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you find my work valuable.

1. Shameless plug: I’m available as a freelancer in case anyone wants me to evaluate their programs!

2. Cruelty-Free products are defined as products that don’t test on animals, while vegan cosmetics are those that don’t include animal products.

3. You may be wondering why people may sign up for a program if they are already vegan. Many of them may want to join a community, sign up with a friend, or want to learn more recipes or brands to look for. All of this is great for retention!

4. Researchy note: when I controlled for initial diet, this effect disappears, primarily because people who buy cruelty-free and people who already eat less meat overlapped substantially in my sample. This means we can’t claim that CF purchasing causes dietary change. What we can say is that CF buyers arrive with more aligned values, making them unusually strong candidates for diet-focused interventions — more so than any other factor I tested. A future round with a control group, which I hope to do this year, should help clarify the mechanism.

5. This is backed up in my Te Protejo research: about half of meat-eaters and flexitarians were Cruelty-Free but ate meat.

6. For one, Cruelty-Free consumers tend to be almost entirely women, which means its reach will always be somewhat limited, albeit more targeted.