Pügenwalder Mühle (a German food manufacturer) entered the vegetarian meat substitute market in a timely manner, as a result of which the company's project is already paying off. Although the experience of selling such alternative products was the first became the first for the company. Sausage maker Rügenwalder Mühle says it now sells more vegetarian and vegan meat alternatives than classic cold cuts or tea sausages, writes Alfons Deter in his article at www.topagrar.com.
In 2014, this family-owned company from Bad Zwischenahn in Lower Saxony became one of the first meat processing companies in Germany to focus on the production of vegetarian meat alternatives. As Managing Director Michael Hähnel told Handelsblatt, COVID 19 has given additional impetus to the trend towards conscious eating with plant-based alternative meats.
In the first half of the year, the company managed to increase sales of vegetarian meatballs and mortadella (cooked sausage) by 50%. The company already achieved record sales of € 242 million in 2019, up almost 15% on the previous year, also thanks to the vegetarian boom. Rügenwalder Mühle, thanks to the growing number of fans of purely plant-based nutrition, currently occupies an honorable seventh place among German sausage manufacturers in the country, and the Zur-Mühlen Group is the industry leader today.
"Our classic products are the backbone of the business, and plant-based substitutes have additional profit opportunities. The company now has a share of the German market for meat alternatives of about 40%," Hähnel said. The company has reached its capacity limit due to high demand and is now investing € 20 million to build additional plants. According to current forecasts, the size of the German vegetable meat market could double this year to around € 400 million and rise to € 3 billion in ten years, concludes Handelsblatt.
Source: agroxxi.ru.
