Clean nutrition and products made from high-quality, organic ingredients. This is pretty much how I can sum up Orgain in a few words, without mentioning their Green Initiative program where they aim to further reduce the plastic used in their containers. They’ve reduced the use by 40% in 2020.
While that sounds promising, particularly for someone who went vegan for the environment, we cannot consider Orgain to be a vegan brand. Even though Orgain has some vegan products, they also have products with animal ingredients such as milk and collagen produced from animal proteins.
With that being said, if you’re interested in a vegan nutrition shake or a plant-based protein powder, Orgain is a brand you can trust – the ingredients are high quality, and the vegan products are plenty.
What is Orgain?
Orgain is a brand that develops organic protein supplements and other nutritionally rich supplements that are comparatively more affordable than other organic supplement brands on the market.
Dr. Andrew Abraham is an integrative medicine specialist, cancer survivor, self-proclaimed kitchen chemist, and he saw a need for highly nutritious supplements when undergoing his treatment for cancer. Thus, he created Orgain, with products made from healthy, organic foods.
I’m uncertain whether he follows a plant-based lifestyle, but there are many vegan products among Orgain’s wide selection of products. So, I can happily call it a vegan-friendly brand.
A quick search on Orgain’s official website and I found several vegan products, from organic protein powders, all-in-one nutrition powders, and even pancake and waffle mixes.
Here is a list of vegan products they have available:
Organic Plant-Based Protein Powder
Vegan Organic Nutrition Shake
Organic Protein & Superfoods Plant Based Protein Powder
Organic Protein Snack Bar
Simple Organic Plant Based Protein Powder
Sports Protein Organic Plant Based Powder
Sport Energy Organic Plant Based Powder
Sport Recovery Organic Plant Based Powder
Organic Protein & Greens Plant Based Protein Powder
Organic Meal Powder
Organic Ketogenic Protein Powder
Protein Pancake & Waffle Mix
Organic Kids O-Bar
Organic Superfoods Powder
Organic MCT Oil
The supplements, as you’re able to verify by their name, are organic, and have certificates that validate the products as being fully organic and suitable for vegans.
Unfortunately, Orgain did not go full vegan, so you have products (albeit few) that contain animal ingredients, predominantly milk.
Orgain’s top 2 best-selling products are their plant-based protein powder, and their organic nutrition shake.
Their organic nutrition shake contains milk, though they also have a vegan version of the same product which is easily perceivable by how they name it.
The other animal ingredient present in their non vegan products is collagen peptides derived from bovine animals, which is another name for cows. Collagen peptides are basically proteins molecules made up of amino acids, which are used in collagen supplements with the goal of providing people with healthier skin and hair.
Frankly, from what I’ve researched, I didn’t find the so-called controversial ingredients, which include ingredients such as sugar (derived from sugar cane), palm oil, and artificial colors.
Typically, Orgain uses alternatives such as stevia or monk fruit to sweeten their products, and even if they used regular cane sugar, theirs would be organic, which means it wouldn’t have been refined with bone char.
Orgain uses sunflower oil as opposed to palm oil, but that’s not a better choice. If you gauge the environmental impact of every vegetable oil, you’ll see that palm oil is by far the most efficient vegetable oil crop.
In fact, to produce the same amount of “alternative” oil, you require between four and ten times more land, which is obviously a bad thing, not only in terms of CO2 emissions, but because we will endanger relatively more species when converting critical habitats into monocultures.
That aside, Orgain is a brand that sticks to organic ingredients, so you can trust the product to be highly sustainable from that standpoint.
They still use plastic canisters to store their products – but they’ve reduced their size by 40% while providing the same quantity of servings. This 40% reduction saves around 30,000 pounds of plastic every year, which also positively impacts CO2 emissions.
They are also saving trees by making their canisters smaller.
According to the numbers provided on their official website, they’re saving around 4,900 trees annually, which is equivalent to 580,000 pounds of cardboard.
Orgain products are available through their official website, however, you can also access their products (not all) through major retailers such as Amazon, Target, and Walmart.
Final Verdict
While Orgain is not a 100% vegan brand, they have many vegan products.
Plus, they use organic ingredients, strictly derived from proper foods, so they can also guarantee that each product is highly sustainable, and doesn’t use ingredients with a huge toll on the environment and respective biodiversity.
Yes, they use plastic containers, but they’ve become more efficient at using their resources. They’ve reduced the size of their containers, which resulted in extracting fewer resources from nature, consequently impacting greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2).
The bottom line is that Orgain is a good vegan-friendly brand you can trust, and I’m comfortable when purchasing their products.
