What Are The Vegan Options At Poke Bros?

Poke Bros is a build-your-own poke chain, and a build-your-own menu is normally good news if you are vegan. What decides whether it actually is depends less on the ingredient list than on what the company publishes about those ingredients — and that is where this page needed the most work.

Answer: Poke Bros publishes a recommended vegan bowl of its own, by name, which is genuinely useful. But it publishes no allergen chart and no ingredient statements for anything on its menu, so nothing in that bowl can be ingredient-verified — and the protein option on the menu itself is labelled “Vegetarian,” not vegan.

What Poke Bros Actually Publishes

This distinction matters, because “publishes nothing” would be wrong here. Fetched 31 July 2026:

• A current nutrition guide. Poke-Bros-Nutrition-2026.pdf, two pages, server last-modified 7 January 2026, linked from the site’s main navigation. It gives serving size, calories, fats, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, fibre, sugar, protein and four micronutrients for the signature bowls, bases, proteins, extras, ingredients, toppings and flavours.
• No allergen data at all. The words “allergen,” “contains” and “gluten” each occur zero times in that PDF. It has no allergen columns.
• No ingredient statements at all. Components such as EDAMAME, SRIRACHA AIOLI and OG SAUCE appear as nutrition rows with macros only — never as a composition.

So Poke Bros gives you calories and no chemistry. On the menu page the only live allergen sentence is “Please alert our team to any food allergies.” The menu prints an icon key including “Contains Gluten,” but the gluten icon is commented out of the page’s HTML and no menu item carries an allergen icon at all. A legend that is not wired up is not data.

One more thing the old page never mentioned, and it is the most practical ordering fact on the menu. Poke Bros prints, on the menu itself: “OG SAUCE ADDED TO ALL BOWLS UNLESS REQUESTED OTHERWISE.” Its printed menu also states “NO SUBSTITUTIONS OR ADDITIONS FOR SIGNATURE BOWL INGREDIENTS,” and every signature bowl contains fish, shellfish or chicken. The vegan route at Poke Bros is build-your-own only.

Poke Bros’ Own Vegan Bowl

The old version of this article never cited the one page where Poke Bros addresses this directly. On “Inclusive Choices For Any Diet” (byline “Posted on June 15, 2021 / January 6, 2026”, fetched 31 July 2026), the brand writes:

“Vegan. As a vegan, you are one of 3% of Americans who have committed to a 100% plant based diet. You do not consume any fish, shellfish, or meat derived products, including eggs and dairy. At Poke Bros it’s easy to eat vegan!
Try This Bowl: Rice, Tofu, Cucumber, Sweet Onion, Ginger, Avocado, Pineapple
Sauce Options: Ponzu, Gochujang, OG Sauce”

That is a brand recommendation, and it is the strongest evidence available for this chain. It is not an ingredient statement. It is a marketing page, and the tofu’s marinade, the OG Sauce, the Gochujang and the Ponzu all have undisclosed compositions — Poke Bros publishes nothing about what is in any of them. Take the bowl as the company’s own view of what a vegan should order there, and take the four named unknowns with it.

Two related facts that have to sit next to that quote rather than be smoothed away:

• The protein option on the menu is called “Vegetarian,” not vegan. It appears that way in the protein chooser on the menu page (“…Shrimp / Chicken / Spicy Chicken / Vegetarian”) and as a section heading in the nutrition PDF, which lists “TOFU TOPPING” and “TOFU VEGGIE BOWL” under it. The word “vegan” occurs zero times in the nutrition PDF. Vegetarian is not vegan, and Poke Bros publishes no composition for that option to close the gap.
• Poke Bros’ own vegetarian and vegan recommendations differ. The vegetarian bowl on the same page is “Rice, Seaweed Salad, Marinated Tofu, Cucumber, Ginger, Green Onion, Avocado. Crunch,” with six sauces including Sriracha Aioli, Wasabi Aioli and Coconut Ginger. The vegan bowl drops the seaweed salad and drops those three sauces. That divergence is more informative than either list on its own.

Building a Bowl

Every item below is on Poke Bros’ published menu. None of them has any published allergen or ingredient data, so this is a list of what exists and what the brand itself points vegans towards — not a list of confirmed vegan items.

• Bases — White Rice, Brown Rice, Sushi Rice, Salad, and Half & Half. The old page called these “Veggie Salad” and “half white rice, half brown rice”; the actual names are “Salad” and “Half & Half,” and Poke Bros does not specify which two make up the latter. Sushi Rice was missed entirely. Poke Bros’ own vegan bowl starts with “Rice.”
• Tofu — named in Poke Bros’ vegan bowl. The brand calls it “Marinated Tofu” in the vegetarian bowl and publishes no marinade composition. That is the named unknown.
• Vegetables and fruit — Cucumber, Sweet Onion, Ginger, Pineapple, Avocado, Corn, Carrot, Jalapeno, Edamame, Green Onion. Poke Bros’ own vegan bowl uses cucumber, sweet onion, ginger, avocado and pineapple.
• Sauces — Ponzu, Gochujang and OG Sauce are exactly the three Poke Bros lists for vegans. It does not list Sriracha Aioli, Wasabi Aioli, Coconut Ginger or Sweet Soy for vegans, and the old page was right to leave them out — that is now said explicitly rather than implied. On the printed menu, OG Sauce, Gochujang and Sweet Soy carry the “contains gluten” mark and Ponzu does not; Poke Bros also offers a gluten-free OG Sauce on request. That is not an animal-product issue, but it is the only allergen-adjacent information the brand publishes anywhere.
• Dry toppings — Sesame Seeds, Tempura Flakes, Crispy Onion, Wonton Chips, Crushed Cashew Nuts. The old page’s advice here was the best-written thing on it and is kept: you will have to check with Poke Bros how these are made. Two corrections — Tempura Flakes and Wonton Chips were missed, and Crispy Onion carries the gluten mark. “Toasted Coconut” appears in the nutrition table but is not a topping on the menu’s topping row; it is also a mochi flavour.

Watch the build-your-own ingredient list itself: Masago (fish roe) and Crab Stick sit in the same step as the vegetables, not in the protein step.

What This Page Used to Say, and Why It Was Wrong

• “Seaweed Salad. Ask the staff not to include any animal byproducts. Seaweed is safe for vegans.” — not supported. Poke Bros publishes no ingredient list for its seaweed salad, marks it as containing gluten, puts it in its vegetarian recommendation and leaves it out of its vegan one. That is not proof it contains dairy or egg, but it is the brand declining to endorse it for vegans, and the claim was about a dressed prepared salad with an undisclosed dressing rather than about seaweed. The dressing is the specific unknown.
• “Protein — Veggie Salad” — the option is called Vegetarian, and Poke Bros publishes no composition, no nutrition row and no allergen data for it. Presenting an item the brand labels vegetarian as a vegan protein is exactly the error this site exists to avoid.
• “Its vegan options are as common as the regular ones” — not supported. All the signature bowls contain fish, shellfish or chicken and Poke Bros states they cannot be modified.
• “More than 60 locations… Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Tennessee” (eleven states) — contradicted by Poke Bros’ own homepage, which says twice: “Poke Bros has over 80 locations nationwide, and growing!” and “With more than 80 locations across 15 states—and growing—we’re bringing our fresh poke bowls to communities throughout the Midwest, East Coast, and beyond.”
• The founding story — the 2016 date, the California trip, the “extensive research as well as trial and error,” the first “Sushi in a Bowl.” None of it appears on any Poke Bros page fetched, so all of it has been removed rather than restated.

Two decoys are worth flagging for anyone checking this brand themselves. The only occurrence of the word “vegan” anywhere on the menu page is “VEGAN CHOCOLATE” inside a mochi ice-cream flavour list, and that list carries the caveat “*flavors may be different by location.” It is a dessert flavour name, not a dietary designation, and not reliably stocked. Poke Bros publishes no ingredient or allergen data for its mochi at all. And the menu’s “Contains Gluten” icon, as noted above, is switched off in the page code.

What Was Removed

Roughly 950 words — about 58% of the old article — were not about ordering at Poke Bros and have been deleted:

• A ~350-word general history of poke covering traditional Hawaiian preparation, kinilaw, poqui poqui, hoe-deopbap, ceviche, sashimi and a San Diego poke festival. None of it was about Poke Bros, none of it was sourced, and its ingredient list (teriyaki sauce, mushrooms, cilantro) does not match Poke Bros’ actual menu. It also carried a spliced sentence about poke continuing to evolve “as we head into 2025.”
• A ~300-word home recipe for a vegan poke bowl with nineteen ingredients and four method steps — a recipe to cook at home, on a page about what to order in a restaurant.
• A nineteen-line nutrition panel attached to that recipe, giving figures like “Calories. 600 of the Daily Value (DV),” “Sodium. 1422.5 mg,” “Vitamin K. 60%.” These were unsourceable and internally incoherent — “600 of the Daily Value” is not a unit — and Poke Bros’ own nutrition PDF gives real figures for real bowls, none of which match. They have been deleted rather than adjusted.
• Three paragraphs of health advice built on that invented sodium figure, including claims about high blood pressure, stomach cancer and heart disease. Medical claims resting on a made-up number.
• A “Top 10 Poke Bowl Restaurants In The US” list naming ten independent restaurants and asserting that each has vegan-friendly options, none of it checked against those restaurants’ own data.

Also worth recording for anyone re-checking: the chain’s domain is eatpokebros.com. “pokebros.com” resolves to an unrelated webmail server and “pokebros.net” is an unrelated Japanese Pokémon site.

The Honest Summary

Poke Bros gives you one thing most small chains do not — a bowl it names, in its own words, as the one for vegans — and withholds the thing that would let anyone verify it. There is no allergen chart, no ingredient statement and no composition for the tofu marinade or any of the three sauces it recommends.

If you order Poke Bros’ own vegan bowl, you are trusting the company’s word rather than a document. That is a reasonable thing to do and a different thing from a confirmed vegan meal, and this page is no longer going to pretend otherwise. Remember to ask them to hold the OG Sauce if you would rather choose your own, since it goes on every bowl by default, and expect to build your own rather than modify a signature bowl.