Crowdbutching.com's meat pack turnover grows

Crowdbutching.com’s 2016 turnover grew more than 40 % and the online platform for fair and traceable meat hopes to replicate that growth this year. Since last Friday, German customers can order pork meat packs online.

Meat packs from online butchery

Crowdbutching.com has three online stores, koopeenkoe.nl, koopeenvarken.nl and koopeenkip.nl (focused on cow, pig and chicken respectively) and those welcomed more than 30,000 consumers last year, 10 % of which came from Amsterdam. In total, 450 cows, 150 pigs and more than 26,000 chickens were processed for meat. “We plan to continue our 40 % growth this year”, koopeenkoe.nl’s Philip Freeke said.

The online butchery noticed 60 % of customers who ordered something comes back within a year. One in three does that within six months even, whether it is beef, pork or chicken.

Overall, the buyers have given the meat an 8.6 rating and there are multiple reasons why people buy at Crowdbutching: the meat can be traced to its origin, the animals have lived a better life and are also processed entirely, from head to toe. These are the most important motives for customers to buy online, according to a survey with 1,4000 customers.

“In a time where people are confronted with countless scandals and cannot be sure what to believe from the meat industry, we notice our customers cherish sustainable and traceable meat. People want to know what they are eating again. We feel it is our job to make the market as transparent as possible”, founder Berend te Voortwis, who also owns Lindenhoff farm, says.

German meat buyers

German meat buyers are also interested in buying a cow together, processed from head to toe. Through its German websites, kaufnekuh.de and kaufeinschwein.de, German customers can now buy both cow meat and pig meat, the latter only since last Friday.

“Our German packages are slightly different, targeted to the German consumer. Meat is proportioned differently and processed into other products, like Rinderbraten and Suppenfleisch”, Philip Freeke said. “Over the past few days, we sold more than fifteen pigs.”

Crowdbutching: buy meat together

The company was founded in 2014 by food entrepreneurs Yvo van Rijen and Berend te Voortwis, the latter has been involved in “good food” for fourty years. Crowdbutching, mixed from crowdfunding and butching, brings customers together (crowd) to buy a piece of a chicken, cow or pig.

The animal will only be slaughtered when all of the meat is sold, which means nothing is lost. The orders are then delivered at home, all across the Netherlands and has also been active in Germany for the past year.

The Te Voortwis family has owned the Boerderij Lindenhoff for a hundred years and Ben te Voortwis starting farming cattle in the 1970s as a hobby. By the end of the 1980s, he supplied “meat with guarantee” to butchers and the hospitality industry. In 2006, he transferred his farm to his sons, Berend, Willem and Dirco.