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Wait, are you saying that all these companies do these vegan things because of profit? ;)
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Well, there's a new market segment emerging, so naturally the existing big(ger) players in the existing market try to cater for it. It may well be that vegan ingredients for this sort of thing are cheaper to buy for them (e.g., vegan Quorn cheaper than animal corpse flesh), but I'm not sure that's always the case. For instance, dairy milk chocolate is cheaper to produce than non-milk chocolate because dairy milk is a cheaper ingredient than cocoa in, for example, Switzerland, and I think (would have to check) that egg pasta is cheaper to produce than 100% durum wheat pasta, because factory-farmed egg is a cheap junk ingredient.
The bigger players moving in may mean that smaller vegan start-up businesses don't get as much of a slice of the pie, but it may also mean that because the bigger players increase the slice of the pie, ultimately even the smaller vegan businesses benefit more. Who knows, it's probably very different on a case-by-case basis.
As mentioned many times previously, there's always the debate whether to influence from the outside in (only buy from 100% vegan companies--I've met people who've said they do this for food) or from the inside out (buy vegan stuff from non-vegan companies to make them bebad ome more vegan). I think there's not much between, although I try not to buy from particularly bad non-vegan companies that have vegan products.
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Simba
Oliver Schick
@dumps
I'm still in two minds about all the "vegan version of xyz" stuff that's going on at the moment. What got me scratching my chin was something (I think) Oliver posted upthread about Pat Val not putting butter in their puff pastry to save money. I was also confused when reading the back of supermarket puff pastry, that most of it also appeared to contain no butter.
What I mean is, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Greggs' vegan sausage rolls were cheaper to make than their meaty ones. That's not necessarily a reason not to eat them, of course, just that the moves from KFC/Subway/Greggs etc. to launch vegan products could be a nice little margin enhancer for them to subsidise lower prices in the rest of their business.
Food for thought.