German meat giant turns attention to vegetarian options

“Logical step”

Rügenwalder Mühle wants to counter meat’s increasingly bad image as an ever more consumers have (partially) moved over to alternative food intake: they want healthier food and a smaller ecological food print. The meat industry uses a huge amount of natural resources.

“Our brand is well-positioned, but the meat industry is not”, CEO Christian Rauffus told German Der Spiegel. “Vegetarian products are merely a logical step to us.” He has even called sausages the cigarette of the future, exactly because of that worsening public image.

The move has already proven to be a success: four of the company’s ten best-selling products are vegetarian products and it expects 30 % of its 2020 turnover to come from vegetarian products. If the current growth is maintained, the company should reach that forecast next year already.