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Prince Khaled Bin Alwaleed has announced his plans to open a minimum of 10 vegan restaurants and cafes throughout the Middle East.
Prince Khaled tucks into the plant-based dishes of Cha-Ya, a vegan Japanese restaurant in San Francisco’s bustling Mission District. Photo: Elizabeth McSheffrey
Prince Khaled Bin Alwaleed has announced his plans to open a minimum of 10 vegan restaurants and cafes throughout the Middle East.
The Saudi Prince announced his vision for his chain of vegan eateries in a Facebook post, stating:
“By 2020 we are aiming to have a minimum of 10 restaurants/cafes. Our region occupies parts of the top ten most obese counties in the world. This is crazy and frankly a joke we have reached this level. I’m not saying opening 10 restaurants will solve this issue, but you better believe it’s a step in the right direction.”
The prince also shared a map with the post with locations marked in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates indicating potential locations for the new vegan restaurants.
In his Facebook announcement, Prince Khaled said that many countries traditional diet’s side effects “on states and society, economic, social, and health,” are a disaster “that must be fought.”
“We have to boycott fast food restaurants and focus on our health and our children’s health before this disaster increases.”
Environmentalist
Prince Khaled Bin Alwaleed, who is son of one of the wealthiest people in the world, billionaire investor and philanthropist HRH Prince Alwaleed bin Talal follows a very strict vegan diet after taking part in a hunting trip that exposed the cruelty that animals are put through.
“It’s all tied together,” says bin Alwaleed. “Animal welfare, factory farming, the environment — usually they’re solvable if we look at things in an economic way, a humane way and a practical way rather than a greedy way.”
His passion for environmentalism has also led him to invest in clean energy and vegan companies, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and chef Matthew Kenney’s plant-based restaurants. Prince Khaled has also partnered with online media outlet Plant Based News, which he describes as ‘beautiful platform for helping people to understand what exactly a plant-based diet is, and what that means for animals’.
