Monday, September 6th marked the official beginning of the 21-day Vegan Kickstart campaign sponsored by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), in an effort to promote vegan diets and healthier lifestyles.

Getting your foot in the door can be the hardest part of attracting new customers, particularly with once-upon-a-time niche items like vegetarian foods. However, with new business models sprouting up each day, more and more options are becoming available to get the word out.

No matter where you stand on meat analogues, it’s been hard to miss the latest news that scientists at the University of Missouri have come up with a soy-based product that very closely imitates chicken flesh. This latest food breakthrough is featured in the upcoming issue of Time Magazine, which touts that this is the “first soy product that not only can be flavored to taste like chicken but also breaks apart in your mouth the way chicken does: not too soft, not too hard, but with that ineffable chew of real flesh.”

A newly published survey of nearly 6,000 vegetarians from the United Kingdom estimates that vegetarians make up about 6% of the adult U.K. population. Moreover, “lapsed vegetarians” (those who tried the diet and moved away) make up about one-tenth of the U.K. population.

According to the 2010 Consumer Food Safety Study by Deloitte, greater numbers of consumers are doing research and reading food labels more carefully when compared with 2008, but fewer people are concerned about food safety issues. This latest study is yet another indicator of the growing savvy of today’s food consumers.