Labels You Can Trust and Labels You Cannot

A formal certification means an outside body has audited the supply chain. It is expensive, which is why small independents rarely have one and large manufacturers usually do — the absence of a certificate on a cafe door says almost nothing about the food. Its presence says the paperwork is real.

A self-declaration on a menu is a promise by the person who wrote it. In a small owner-run place that is often the most reliable signal available, because the person making the promise is the person cooking. In a chain, the same words have travelled through a marketing department and several kitchens that never read them.

The symbol on the window

The green V in a circle is not one thing. Several organisations use variations, and plenty of cafes print something similar because it communicates quickly. Treat it as a signal of intent rather than a guarantee of process — useful for narrowing a shortlist, useless as a final answer.

Which brings this back to descriptions. A sentence someone wrote about their own kitchen carries an implicit accountability that a symbol does not: it is specific, it is theirs, and it can be checked against the menu in front of you. That is why this site's plant-based list reads descriptions and not badges, and why it says so on the page rather than presenting the result as a verified directory. It is not verified. It is what people wrote about themselves, gathered in one place.