World vegetarian day, gathering around the table

World vegetarian day, gathering around the table

World vegetarian day falls on 1 October, and companies that mark it usually worry about the menu. The menu is the easy part: one call to a caterer and it is handled. The hard part is doing it without anyone feeling lectured at.

The format is simple: a lunch, a table, and a few things on that table that people take home afterwards. Everything below is about the second half.

A shared lunch, not a statement

One lunch with a plant-based menu: seasonal vegetables, something from the local kitchen cooked a different way, enough variety that nobody is hunting for the one dish they can eat. That is the format, and it works because it asks nothing of anyone.

The version that fails is the one framed as a position, because if you announce that the company is going plant-based for the day, half the room reads it as instruction. Serve good food, say what day it is, and people eat. We have watched both happen.

The table that survives lunch

A table set with disposables is a table nobody remembers, and most of what goes on one is in the bin by two o'clock. Foodware and kitchen accessories change that arithmetic: bowls, boards and serving pieces that come back out for the next lunch and the one after it. Mugs and thermoses for coffee and tea do the same work, and they leave with people at the end of the day.

Cheaper per head is not cheaper if you buy it again every quarter.

A gift in the spirit of the day

1 October is a reasonable moment for something connected to food: plant-based sweets, a water bottle, or a cooler bag for the person who brings lunch from home five days a week, which is an unglamorous gift and one of the most used things we ship.

The gifts we talk clients out of are the themed ones, because a cloth bag printed with a carrot is a cloth bag that stays in a drawer. The item has to make sense on 2 October.

Merchandise that carries a value without announcing it

Companies that mark a day like this are saying they pay attention, and that takes no grand statement. A garment with a small mark, a bag that goes to the shops: the value is in the fact that someone kept it.

The riskiest item is the t-shirt, because people wear what they were going to wear anyway, and the print has to be restrained enough that they would have bought the shirt themselves. Most prints made for an occasion are not, which is why we ask what the garment looks like with the occasion taken away.

Seasonal food. Plates with nothing printed on them. A mug that outlives the day. A print restrained enough to be worn. That is our corner of the business. And the question underneath it: why 1 October is remembered in one company as a good lunch, and in another as a message from marketing.

Four things that fit

The sections above are about the day itself. These four items are the ones that most often end up in the set that goes with it, chosen for the part of the year when nobody remembers what was served on a Tuesday in October.

• Odense Food Storage Container 700ml: 700 ml for the lunch someone made at home, and the item on this list that gets opened most often once the day is over.
• Oregon Carabiner Water Bottle 750ml: 750 ml with a carabiner, so it clips to a bag and leaves the building instead of living in a drawer.
• Impact AWARE™ Small Cooler Bag: small, and aimed at the person who brings lunch from home five days a week rather than at everyone.
• Stedman Classic-T Unisex: the most ordinary item here and the one that needs the most restraint, because a t-shirt is only kept if the print is one the wearer would have chosen.

World vegetarian day is a simple reason to make a working day better and to put the team around one table. Add things people still use in November, and the impression outlasts the last plate.