I am always trying to find new ways to make it easier for people to cook vegetarian more often. More Than Broccoli for me is the key to helping shift the social norm and normalise vegetarian cooking, by showing how you can easily adjust your own favourite recipe or to inspire you to try new dishes and ingredients.
Reflecting on the work so far, I created a calendar for 2023 that people can buy and use, and in that way have a visible reminder right in their home that inspires and helps them to cook vegetarian more often. It also makes for a perfect gift over the holidays. You can buy the calendar in our new online shop by clicking on the image below or first read on for more information.
Introducing the More Than Broccoli calendar
This calendar has been designed with the the key three tips to cooking vegetarian more often in mind.
Plan ahead. Knowing when you will take time to cook vegetarian takes the stress out of trying something new. The calendar has a note on the bottom of each month for you to write down which day of the week you will cook vegetarian that month. Of course it doesn’t have to be the same day each month! It’s up to you. Or you can circle circle the day each week as a visual reminder.
Start a collection. The whole idea of More Than Broccoli in the past year has been to show you new ways of cooking vegetarian. Whether that is by adapting an existing favourite meal to be vegetarian or to share completely new recipes and dishes. Each calendar month shows a different dish using that month’s seasonal vegetables and has a QR code to the full recipe.
Rethink your favourite meal. The calendar has another note on the bottom for you to write down your favourite meal of that month, as it’s likely to be different each season. Write it down and think about how you can adapt it to make it vegetarian. Or, if it’s vegetarian already, it helps you build your own collection.
Sustainability
The calendar was created to build on the success of More Than Broccoli to help people cook vegetarian more often. But we do not want to add to the problem of wasting the Earth’s precious resources at the same time. While thinking about new ways to support people, we’ve done our research on sustainable product design.
This is why all calendars are printed on demand. There is no stock waiting for it to be sold and shipped. It is only printed when someone is actually interested in the product and decides to buy it. If no one buys one, there is no harm done. If people do buy it, it is because they’ve made the conscious decision to invest in helping themselves or others make a sustainable lifestyle change by cooking vegetarian more often.
When someone does decide to purchase a calendar, they are printed and shipped local to you. Using Gelato, we made sure to check that the print on demand service has locations for printing and shipping in the areas that we know most More Than Broccoli readers are located. Gelato has local printing partners across Europe and local delivery partners too. This helps reduce the distance that the product travels and therefore minimises the carbon footprint.
No profit
More Than Broccoli is a personal project and has not been founded to create a profit. Therefore, I have designed the calendar and set everything up in my free time. We use the free version of WooCommerce to manage the products on the website which is an open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress.
When you pay for the calendar, this is to cover printing and shipping costs through Gelato only. More information on Gelato prices can be found here.
Buying the new calendar
You can buy the new calendar directly in the online shop here or by clicking on the product mockup below. If you would rather print the calendar yourself, you can download a copy of the file using this link (please note the calendar is A3 format and has 4cm bleed).