Vegan Salads
Options

Salad and 'healthy' chains (Sweetgreen, Just Salad, Cava-style bowls) are among the most vegan-forward categories in the country. Most of these chains were founded after the rise of plant-based eating and built their menus with vegan options as flagged, named items from day one. The build-your-own format is the dominant pattern, which means a vegan diner has direct control over the dressing, protein, and topping selections.

Dairy and egg trapsCream-based dressings (green goddess, ranch, Caesar in many forms, blue cheese) are dairy. Cheese as a topping is dairy. Goat cheese, feta, and crumbled blue all common adds-to-avoid. Honey appears in some glazes on roasted vegetables - usually flagged in the ingredient view. Egg shows up in Caesar dressing (anchovy and dairy plus egg in many recipes) and in some seasonal protein options. Most salad chains publish ingredient breakdowns down to the dressing component, which makes the trap list easier to navigate than at any other category.

What tends to clearBuild-your-own bowls with grains, beans, tofu or falafel, roasted vegetables, raw vegetables, and a vegan-flagged dressing (most chains have at least three). Olive oil and lemon as the universal fallback dressing. Avocado as a fat add. Hummus where it is on the line. The salad category rewards reading the chain's published vegan flags more than guessing - almost every major salad chain marks vegan items explicitly in the digital ordering flow.