More than 800 vegan businesswomen met in downtown Los Angeles, California, as part of a summit on 8th April 2022. In 2020, Jennifer Stojkovic, a Canadian vegan activist and businesswoman now based in California, founded the Vegan Women Summit ™ (VWS). It is a global events and media organization created to empower women to build a kinder, more sustainable world. It hosts events to foster a community of strong, ambitious rising leaders working to bring compassion to their careers through the production of animal-free products and the promotion of the vegan philosophy. The VWS premiere summit took place in San Francisco on 1st February 2020, but the number of attendees has grown considerably in this year’s event in L.A.
Many of the successful vegan brands in alternative protein were represented at the event, including Ripple Foods, Miyoko’s Creamery vegan butter and cheeses, MeliBio’s plant and fermentation-based bee-free honey and Dr Bronner’s new vegan fair-trade chocolate. The day also featured an impressive line-up of inspiring speakers, such as Karuna Rawal, Chief Marketing Officer at Nature’s Fynd, Joanne Lee Molinaro (The Korean Vegan) The Luxury Vegan’s founder Dominique Side, and actresses Danielle Monet and Alicia Silverstone.
Stojkovic told UnchainedTV about the event the following: “It is the only space in the entire world, the only conference, that’s focused on elevating women in the future of food, fashion, beauty, and animal-free technology. Our goal is really to show the nearly four billion women on the planet that they can be a part of building a kinder, more sustainable world. We want to inspire, educate, and empower them to bring compassion to their careers in any way possible, whether it’s through creating a company or joining a food tech company, or becoming an advocate in their own industry. That’s why we bring together actresses, celebrities, venture capitalists, founders, and executives…. particularly women of colour, as 60% of our community are women of colour — about 75% of our speakers were women of colour.”