Vegan Investing: Could Your Pension Be Funding Industries You Avoid?
Article written by Paolo Andina
You read labels. You checked whether your shoes were leather. You pushed your company cafeteria to add real options, and maybe you got the catering policy changed too.
And then, every month, a portion of your salary goes into a retirement account that owns shares in slaughterhouses.
Not by your choice. By default. Superannuation in Australia, auto-enrolment in the UK, 401(k) plans in the US, sector-wide schemes across the Netherlands and Scandinavia — the legal form differs, but the mechanism is similar almost everywhere. Contributions are mandatory or automatic, the money goes into broad market indices, and in most systems nobody ever asks you what you think about what those indices contain.
For a mid-career professional, that account is often the single largest asset they own. Larger than their savings. Sometimes larger than their home equity.
It is also, almost certainly, the least examined part of their ethical life.
I spent several weeks exploring this issue myself. What follows is what I discovered, because I could find surprisingly little practical guidance on the subject.
Until a few weeks ago, there was one vegan equity ETF in the world
It is the US Vegan Climate ETF, ticker VEGN, launched in September 2019. It applies a vegan screen — no animal products, no animal testing, no animals in sport or entertainment — to a large-cap US universe. As of September 2026 it manages a little under $200 million, which in the global fund industry is a very small fund.
In September 2026, its issuer listed a second one: the International Vegan Climate ETF, covering developed markets outside the US, tracking a separate index and launching with around 130 holdings.
Seven years passed between the first vegan ETF and the second. In the same period, the fund industry launched thousands of products.
What VEGN’s record does tell us is worth stating carefully, because one particular objection comes up every time this subject is raised. Since inception, its annualised return has been in the mid-to-high teens, and its issuer has described performance as having broadly kept pace with the S&P 500 since 2019. Anyone citing these figures should check the measurement date, whether the number is NAV or market price, and whether it includes dividends.
What this supports is a modest conclusion: there is currently no evidence that vegan screening inherently reduces investment performance. Nor is there evidence that it improves it. The track record is limited to a single fund over seven years, so no firm conclusions can be drawn. What it does demonstrate is that aligning investments with vegan values does not necessarily require sacrificing returns
Depending on where you live, you may not be able to buy either fund. Retail investors in the European Union generally cannot purchase US-domiciled ETFs, because those funds do not produce the key information document required under the PRIIPs regulation.
The problem is bigger than two ETFs
These funds prove that a vegan equity strategy can be built and run. They do not prove that the problem is solved, because a retirement portfolio is not only equities. It holds government bonds, corporate bonds, real estate, cash, sometimes private markets and infrastructure. Each of those is a separate screening question with its own answer.
So the real gap is not a missing fund. It is a missing architecture: there is no coherent set of building blocks from which a vegan investor can assemble a complete, diversified portfolio across asset classes.
That is a much larger absence than a single product, and after weeks of looking, I found remarkably little evidence that anyone is building it.
ESG is not the same as vegan
This is the trap most people fall into, and I fell into it too.
Every provider now offers ESG, “responsible” or “sustainable” versions of their funds, and it is tempting to assume this is close enough. It is not.
ESG criteria measure governance quality, carbon emissions, labour conditions, board composition and controversy exposure. They do not measure a company’s relationship with animals. The world’s largest food conglomerates — companies whose core business is selling animal products at industrial scale — routinely score well on ESG ratings, because they have competent boards, publish emissions targets and manage their supply chains professionally.
Buying the sustainable version of a fund, as a vegan, changes almost nothing. ESG frameworks were built to answer a different question, and they answer it reasonably well. They were simply never designed to answer ours.
The sector fund trap
My next idea felt clever. If broad funds are contaminated, buy sector funds in industries that have nothing to do with animals. Utilities. Telecommunications. Mining. An electricity grid operator does not sell meat.
I tested a European utilities fund first. Low cost, physically replicated, twenty-five companies. It looked ideal.
Then I read the holdings. Among the largest positions was ENGIE, whose subsidiary ENGIE BiOZ builds and operates biomethane plants fed by livestock effluent. The company’s own biogas brochure describes producing biomethane from the effluent of six farms and collecting slurry by pipeline, and its subsidiary’s materials list manure and slurry among the agricultural inputs it contracts for.
ENGIE does not sell meat. It has built a business line that turns the waste stream of industrial animal farming into revenue. Whether that fails your test is your decision — but you would never have found it by reading the fund’s name. The exercise is reproducible: fund holdings are publicly disclosed, and companies describe their own businesses in their reports.
The second fund taught me something different, and in some ways worse. Its sector label did not describe its contents at all: the largest holdings were not the utilities I expected, and among them sat companies whose exposure runs through their clients rather than their own products. A company’s own activities are documented in its annual report. Its client relationships often are not. Some funds cannot be screened at all, not because the information is hidden, but because it was never published.
There is a structural reason this keeps happening, and it comes from the screeners themselves. When Beyond Investing launched its European vegan index, it reported that the exclusions removed roughly 54% of the market capitalisation of the Solactive GBS Developed Markets Europe Large & Mid Cap index. For the US index the figure was around 41%. Current figures are on the index factsheets.
When something between two-fifths and half of a market fails the filter, building a diversified sector basket without running into borderline cases becomes extremely difficult.
What comes closest to clean
The picture is not entirely bleak, but the workable options sit in unexpected places — and none of them is a certification.
Government bonds. The issuer is a state rather than a company, so corporate animal-product screening does not apply in the same way. Whether sovereign debt fits your own policy, given what governments fund, is a separate question you should answer deliberately.
Real estate funds. The underlying business is letting space, not manufacturing products. But the funds own buildings occupied by tenants of every kind, including food retail and processing, so this is a judgement call rather than a clean answer.
Precious metals. Gold and silver have no animal supply chain.
Cryptocurrencies. On the narrow question of animal exploitation, a blockchain has no animal supply chain in its underlying protocol. Whether the environmental profile is compatible with your ethics is a different question, and a legitimate one.
Individual stocks. The most direct route to a strict criterion, because you choose every company yourself.
Corporate bonds are not in this list, and this catches people out. A bond is a loan. Buying the debt of a food conglomerate provides financing to that company, just as buying its shares gives you an economic stake in it.
Where you have the choice
The Vegan Society’s definition asks us to exclude animal exploitation as far as is possible and practicable.
What follows is my own reading of that principle, not theirs. It seems to me that the clause exists because some situations genuinely leave you without an option — and that investing is often not one of them. Participation in a pension system may be compulsory, but that does not automatically mean every underlying investment choice is fixed. In many schemes you can select from a range of funds, or move to a self-directed arrangement. In others, choice is limited or genuinely absent, and that distinction matters enormously.
So the honest version is this: work out where your choice actually reaches, and exercise it there. Where it genuinely does not reach, the answer is the final section of this article — make the demand visible.
What does require thought is the boundary itself, because real cases are ambiguous. Does a supermarket chain that sells meat alongside everything else fail your test? A bank that lends to agriculture? A manufacturer that offers a vegan option alongside a leather one? These are not trick questions. They are the decisions that determine what you can own, and they deserve to be made carefully and in writing, once, rather than improvised in front of a company you happen to like.
A portfolio built this way is likely to be less diversified than a conventional one. Fewer holdings, more concentration in whatever survives the screen, more work to maintain, and no fund manager rebalancing it for you. Over decades that may well cost something in expected return.
My portfolio is finally going vegan. It will not be optimal by textbook standards. Those are two different criteria, and only one of them is negotiable.
The part that actually needs leaders
Everything above describes a market failure, and market failures do not fix themselves through individual choice.
When I asked one of the most flexible investment providers I could find whether they offered anything matching my criteria, their answer was striking. They told me, in writing, that they would very much like to offer such instruments, and that to their knowledge none currently exist.
That is not necessarily resistance. It is, at the very least, evidence that demand for these products has not become visible enough to justify building them.
Nobody builds a product for a market that stays silent. Seven years passed between the first vegan ETF and the second, and I found little evidence that asset managers are hostile to the idea. What is clear is that vegan capital has not organised itself at anything like the scale of vegan consumer demand.
Here are three simple actions that can help move the market forward:
Write to your pension provider. Ask what animal-related exclusion criteria they apply. Ask for a fund that applies them. Put it in writing, because written requests get logged and counted in ways that conversations do not.
Ask the same of your employer. If you have influence over the provider your company selects, or sit anywhere near the committee that reviews it, that is a lever most people never think to pull.
Talk about it. We built the plant-based food market by making demand visible. Investment products follow exactly the same logic, and the capital involved dwarfs the grocery budget.
We changed the menu. We changed the materials. We have barely started on the money — and the money, quietly, may be the largest thing any of us owns.
Others have written about the gap between vegan values and pension investing — including The Vegan Society and VeganFriendly. What I have added here is what happened when I tried to close that gap myself: the funds I screened, the holdings I found inside them, and the answers I received from providers.
I am an investor, not a financial adviser, and nothing here is investment advice. Naming a fund is not a recommendation to buy it. I hold a position in VEGN. Performance figures are past performance and guarantee nothing; fund data and index figures change over time, so verify anything before acting on it. - Paolo Andina
"This article was written with AI assistance. The research, the fund screening, the correspondence with providers, and the views expressed are my own."
