The GOODS from Virtuous Pie
Vancouver, BC | Vancouver’s favourite plant-based pizza and ice cream restaurant is now selling its house-made, cultured plant-based cheeses. Select nut and tofu-based cheeses will be available for purchase at Virtuous Pie’s Wesbrook Village location near UBC, every Friday to Sunday, while quantities last.
The first two cheeses for sale will be the tofu-based feta and lemon-herb chèvre, two of the most popular cheese toppings for the restaurant’s pizzas and salads.
“While we call them cheese, they aren’t meant to be copies of dairy cheeses,” says Jim Vesal, Director of Culinary and Business Development. “They’re delicious stand-alone products in a category all to themselves.”
Pints of plant-based ice cream have been available for takeaway since Virtuous Pie opened in September 2016, but this is the first time the chain has offered any of its other house-made products for sale.
A 184 gram wheel of cheese will retail for $12 and can last refrigerated for up to seven days. While the feta and the chèvre are the inaugural offerings, other house-made favourites. like the cashew mozzarella. will be available soon.
“One of my favourite ways to enjoy the cheeses are on a cheese board with crackers, olives, and fresh fruit in the summer. But you can use them in pretty much anything you’d use dairy cheese for, like salads, sandwiches, pastas, you name it,” says Vesal.
Customers are invited to place their orders by phone and pick up their purchases at the UBC location, Fridays 8 am to 11 pm, Saturdays 10 am to 11 pm, and Sundays 10 am to 10 pm. Online ordering will be available within the next few weeks. The restaurant will also be accepting wholesale orders by the end of the August and may expand the program to other locations in the future.
“Our customers have been asking us to sell our cheeses since we opened. So we’re pretty excited to be able to make this happen,” says Lia Loukas, Director of Marketing and Business Development.