Monday, 2 June 2014

INTERVIEW With Eric Brent, Founder of HappyCow

I recently did an interview with Eric Brent, the founder of HappyCow.

The interview is for the bilingual Chinese English vegan mag GoVeg based in Hong Kong. The mag is published by a very active vegan and her group, who not only publishes this new veg mag but also organizes weekly very popular Meat Free Mondays meetings and an annual Hong Kong Veg Fest.

For anyone who doesn’t know, HappyCow is the online and interactive search guide for vegan slash vegetarian restaurants worldwide. Two decades ago traveling around the globe and finding a decent veg meal in unknown territory was challenging to say the least. Thanks to Eric and the HappyCow team, eating a vegan meal in another country has become easy and exciting. It is not only the vegan traveler but also the vegan restaurants that profit greatly from the HappyCow service. All in all HappyCow has done very much for the veg community.

During the interview I did found out that Eric is kind of a spiritual guy, very interesting and new to me, and I especially did find his view on vegans and enlightenment worthwhile to read.

The interview with Eric is on page 18. (I also did write the Kyoto’s Refined Vegan Temple Foods” article on page 48.)

With over 30.000 daily visitors HappyCow has become a commercially very interesting website. Eric already could have sold HappyCow for a big bag of money to people who would have turned HappyCow into a commercial site full with adds and cookies, a la Facebook, where we are treated as mere “eyeballs”. 

Not for Eric, no sell out here, he sticks to his idealistic guns and keeps on developing HappyCow as a friendly service to us, his fellow vegans. Thanks, Eric!

The HappyCow story is an inspiring and positive story to us all, how anyone idealistic can create great and worthwhile things.

HappyCow has several Veg Restaurant apps for your mobile phone. HappyCow also recently published a vegan recipe book.


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