Why are vegan and gluten free items more expensive?

Lower volume of sales makes the niche supply lines more expensive to maintain

Less competition means more premium prices until a competitor gets attracted to the market

It's worth noting that vegan and gluten free foods are not more expensive... Substitute foods are

For gluten free products: the whole production chain needs to use different tools or be sealed off from the rest. You can generally use the same mill, kneader, oven, tray for barley, wheat, rye, etc without meticulous cleaning in between. But if you want it to be gluten free you now need to either do that expensive cleaning or more realistically have an entirely separate set of machinery and ensure it never gets in contact with your main line.

Meat and dairy are subsidized so that consumers pay below market value for those products, the market is not fair and it's not free either.

That's why.

You’d think with healthier, easier to get ingredients would be cheaper than producing regular non vegan items.

Where do you get the idea the ingredients would be healthier or cheaper? Have you ever read the ingredient list of a typical vegan food item? They are some of the highest processed foods the industry can provide, with long lists of chemical additives to make a vegan food item resemble ... food. In the US, they even use food colorings for that stuff that are illegal for ages in other parts of the world.

Take that vegan burger, for example. It typically starts with TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein), already highly processed stuff made from soy beans, wheat, or peas. And it gets downhill from there. Watch this guy and learn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ND4lUi-i2s - if you cannot make sense of his German, just skip to 4:36 where he shows what kind of chemicals one needs to make a "vegan burger patty".

The supermarket does not care how it was made.

Vegan is a feature, so they want to make you pay extra for it.

Adding to all of this: the meat and dairy industry are heavily subsidised in the US and many european countries, meaning the government pays a lot to keep the cost of the products down.

For the things you mentioned, the vegan and gluten-free options are processed much more. Beef, for example, is arguably a "whole food."

Gluten-free isn't healthier unless you have specific conditions. Most people can handle gluten fine, and some vegan foods are primarily gluten (such as seitan).

Vegan isn't inherently healthy, especially if your eating mostly processed foods. A primarily whole-food vegan diet is likely healthier and cheaper than most people's diets though.

Economies of scale and subsidies/successful lobbying.

At one time vegan shoes were cheap. And suddenly, everywhere the non-leather shoes disappeared and vegan shoes popped up and were advertised at ridiculous prices. They just changed the wording and adjusted the prices. It's just a marketing tactic and one they use often for whatever stuff you can buy. It's not so much that people are willing to pay. It's just that vegan friendly, decently quality at decent prices are very hard to find now. At least here in the european country where i live.

I think others have covered the economies of scale and niche products creating the disparity.

But I wanted to suggest that if your grandpa is regularly eating gluten free bread, we have found that making it at home is SO much more affordable than buying a loaf at the store. (Even though gluten free flour is also more expensive.) Most of the gluten free flours have their own sandwich bread recipe, either on the bag or their website. I don’t know what flours you have access to, but they can be wildly different blends, so using their tested recipes is always best.

We’ve mastered our favorite so it takes only 15 minutes of “work” and then just time in the oven. It’s also much better than store bought! I don’t know if that’s possible for you, but it could be a lovely weekly ritual for you and your grandpa.

Also, to anyone suggesting we just eat rice and beans, I’m an old celiac. We went without bread, pasta, cake, pastries, cookies, brownies, pizza, and crackers before these products came to market. These are mostly “fun” foods that I don’t eat regularly, but usually pop up in social situations. Do you know how many sad birthdays with no cake we’ve had? How often we’ve watched our friends and family eat things we could never have? I am so grateful to the “fad” gluten free people who made it possible to have culturally/socially important foods we were missing out on for decades!!

Vegan =/= health, salted fries, palm oil and ketchup is all vegan and I doubt you think of it as healthy.

But anyways, only reason healthy food would be cheaper than non healthy one is if there's taxes on the non healthy stuff. Non healthy stuff is sold because it's cheaper or tastier. If they can add the healthy label to sell more they will.

Have a friend that did a masters in psychology which paper was about Biological food. Anything you see with that label gets a price hike. Rarely the on the actual products tested there were feasible differences because biological isn't a well defined concept.

Father of a friend plants biological tomatoes for himself. For his peers, you just need to not add chemicals and treat that plant biologically. He however only accepted produce as biological if the seeds came from a platelet treated as such, so his biological stuff is second generation onwards.

Since the concept isn't clearly defined, it's bs and companies use whatever they can to make a buck.

I was thinking something similar too:

Why almond/soy milk is more expensivs than cow milk? To make almond/soy milk you just need to maintain the plants. To make cow milk you need to have cow food, take care of the cow etc. and generally it seems much more inefficient than making plant-based milk. I dont know if they use the whole almond/soy etc to make the milk or only part of them, but still.

On this wikipedia article, under Nutrition and Sustainability, you can see for example that while Soy and oat milks have around half (almond has around ¼) the calories of cow milk (plant based milks seem to be healthier too, due to lower saturated fats and sugar contents), they are much more efficient to produce. Like, oat milk seems to be around 6-7 times more efficient to produce than cow milk which counters the fact that it may have half the calories.

Some may consider cow milk as byproduct of the meat industry, but since baby cows need to feed from it and cows already spend energy to make it, I dont think of it that much as byproduct, it's necessary.

As someone people said though, it probably is due to the financial incentives given to the cow milk industry🤷

Because they can

because fuck you

Anything that’s trendy they know people want to buy they can charge more because people pay it.

A large part of food cost is processing.

A regular burger patty is processed by butchering a cow, running meat through a grinder, and then pressing the grind into patties.

A vegan burger patty has to combine multiple ingredients and seasonings with different preprocessing steps, and then it still has to be pressed into patties.

Out of this, cow butchering is by far the most intensive and costly processing step, but the cost of that is amortized over many cuts of meat, not just the hamburger.

The vegan patty has more things to process in it. And if you're looking at Beyond or Impossible, then some of those things are fancy lab grown proteins.

You have to pay to have morals in a capitalist society.

You can buy everyday items that are gluten free and vegan friendly as well. Look at the ingredients and if they don't have wheat, barley, rye, or triticale then there's a good chance it's gluten free. There are some exceptions to that like canned soups or broths, but you don't have to strictly get items from a gluten free section for it to be gluten free. And your wallet will thank you.

But to answer your question, some GF products have ingredients that are more expensive than wheats. Like tapioca flour for example. But most of it falls under the "healthy" food tax

It's straight up just because people will pay the price they're asking...

Burgers (at least supermarket ones) are made from offcuts and other bits that can't be sold as expensive cuts of meat, so are essentially a byproduct. Pretty much the same for milk. Vegan products usually have to bear the entire cost of production in their price.

Imitation things will cost more because you have to imitate things.

Because the know the people that buy it either are stupid or have no choice (in the cases of the few that actually have to eat those kinds of diets for health reasons).

Yeah. Healthy food is expensive to make, maintain and transport. It's a luxury in our current state.

Because they suck so they don’t sell as many so they make up the difference by charging more. Also a fool and his money are soon parted.