Hey folks - spent the last few months building PlantsPack, an independent vegan discovery platform. No investors, no ads, no tracking beyond what’s needed.
The thing I actually want feedback on is the city scoring system rather than “check out my site.” Every city with ≥5 vegan / vegan-friendly places gets a letter grade A–F based on four dimensions:
- Accessibility - places per capita (adjusted for city size)
- Choice - how many distinct cuisines / categories are represented
- Variety - mix across restaurants, shops, stays
- Quality - review ratings + verification status
The goal is to answer “where should I travel / move to next?” at a glance, and to make it visible which cities desperately need more contributors.
Current coverage: ~37K places across 177 countries, mostly Europe + N. America + SE Asia. A lot of cities still score D/F because nobody’s added the places yet - that’s a data problem, not a “these cities are terrible” problem, and I’m trying to be honest about that in the UI.
What I’d love this community’s take on:
- Does your city show up? Does the grade feel right vs. your lived experience?
- Is the fully-vegan vs. vegan-friendly split a useful distinction, or do you want more granularity (e.g., “has vegan options but the staff sigh when you ask”)?
- What would make this more useful than HappyCow or Google Maps for you? (I’m not pretending to be better on coverage - but I am looking for more pain points to fix)
Happy to answer anything about the tech, the methodology, or the data. Source code is closed for now but the data model is open to discussion.
I live in the small town of Uddevalla, Sweden. I was surprised to see 7 places show up, all added by PlantsPack Team. However I did not feel it was accurate and I wonder what data you’re based off? It sadly doesn’t seem to be openstreetmap data, which would have made the town 99% mapped because I have personally added almost every restaurant on there! I really think you should focus more on openstreetmap as the foundation, it is free and open and more empowering to the user than google maps.
You’re 100% right, and thank you for this - OpenStreetMap is our primary data source, so the fact that your contributions aren’t showing up is genuinely a bug on our end, not a philosophy difference.
What happened: our last Sweden import was stale, and worse - many OSM places that lack an addr:city tag ended up with no city assigned on our side, so they disappeared from the city page entirely. A place you tagged perfectly in OSM would be in our database but invisible.
We’re running a fresh re-import for Sweden right now with reverse geocoding to fix exactly that gap. Your mapped places should start appearing soon.
And yes - fully agree on OSM as the foundation. Free, open, community-verified, no pay-to-play listings. It’s exactly the spirit we want PlantsPack to embody.
The fact that you’ve personally mapped most of the town is the kind of local knowledge no scraper can replicate. If anything still looks off after the sync (should finish by tomorrow morning and I will get back to you about the exact data-import results for your town), you can also add/edit (your listings) directly on plantspack.com - goes live immediately.
Also your input made our scraping so much better, that I aim to improve a global coverage by the end of the day tomorrow using new logic, so if you may confirm that the coverage looks better and if something is still wrong - that will move the needle even more. Huge thanks! 🙏
Ok that makes sense. I see now that the places listed in Uddevalla have all been tagged as diet:vegan=yes by me on OSM, which I have not been equating with “vegan friendly”, it means more like 1 or more vegan item, or like can I visit this place and have some kind of valuable experience? Vegan friendly is kind of strongly worded for a lot of those places, which makes me consider using diet:vegan=limited but that tag is not very popular and a lot of people want to get rid of it. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Key:diet:vegan
I reread the OSM wiki https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:diet:vegan and it says for diet:vegan=yes “The establishment usually offers a decent amount of vegan products.” And by that definition I may have been mapping thing wrong, but I still want people to know that they can get at least SOME value out of some place. Maybe using the limited is a part of the solution, and maybe PlantsPack can be used to provide some nuance.
PS you should add directions for OSM linked alongside google maps and apple maps links.
At the moment there are 22 places in Uddevalla https://www.plantspack.com/vegan-places/sweden/uddevalla, I hope your places started to show up. I agree that “vegan-friendly” is not fully enough to describe the range, but I also don’t like the split on other platforms, so I’m keeping it as is for now, until I will be more confident in scraping logic or will have enough data to split places with good vegan menu and solid options, form those, where we might have a snack or <3 dishes, but they are still worth mentioning. OSM link is in the making as I write this - should be available soon.
And thanks :)
P.S. I’ve used diet:vegan=yes on some initial imports, but it may have been a little mixed. I’m continuously running different checks to make sure the directory on PlantsPack is clear agains multiple APIs, but OSM stays at it’s core.